


Ten Kisses

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Demisexuality, Eventual Smut, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Phone Sex, Smut, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 11:24:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7755886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-316, picking up right where the finale left off.  With six months on the clock and years of emotional baggage to sort out, can Kane and Abby find love before the world ends?  </p><p>(Yes. Yes they can.)</p><p>Originally posted on Tumblr.  Ten chapters based on ten different ask box ficlet prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "catching the other before they fall"

“Go to him,” Clarke says, and so she does.

She feels her own eyes begin to sting at the sound of his rough, ragged sobs as he lets himself dissolve into her, sinking wearily against her shoulder.  She holds him close, cradling him like a child, her small strong hands stroking his back and his hair.  She used to comfort Clarke like this, when she was young and had nightmares.  Touch is what Marcus needs.  Safe arms around him.

She would like to stay here until the pain in his heart has eased, until her touch has chased away the dark horrors inside his mind.   _(How long, Abby? Months? Years?)_

But they aren’t given that time.

The moment Clarke stands up from the throne and tells them the thing she has to tell them, everything changes.  Marcus pulls away from her, turning – like everyone else in the room – to the dais where Clarke stands beside Bellamy, letting her words wash over them.

 _Six months,_ she says.

(Bellamy doesn’t even look frightened, Abby observes.  Just weary and numb.  He thought it was over, they all thought it was over, but she finds herself wondering if it ever will be.)

She looks at Clarke.  Clarke looks back at her.

It isn’t over.

It’s only beginning.

And Charles Pike is lying on the ground, astonishingly, impossibly dead – a thing Abby can’t even begin to comprehend just yet – which means Marcus Kane is the _de facto_ Chancellor once again.  He is the leader of Skaikru and Clarke needs him and there is work to be done, so Abby watches – heart aching with helpless, desperate pity – as he staggers weakly to his feet.

For a moment, it works.

For a moment, he’s Chancellor Kane again.  Head high, shoulders squared, ready to do whatever Clarke needs him to do.  All eyes in the room are on him, and Abby can feel their collective sigh of relief.   _Kane’s gonna be okay,_ Abby can hear Nathan Miller thinking, watching him let out a long shaky breath. _We’re good.  Kane’s gonna be fine.  Everyone’s gonna be fine._

It lasts until he’s a step away from the dais.

He stumbles, just a little – he’s still dazed, shaky, Abby thinks he may be in shock – and Bellamy puts out an instinctive hand to catch him.  Kane takes it without thinking, an unconscious reflex, then suddenly pulls back in horror, recoiling so violently that he loses his balance.

 _“Kane,”_ says Bellamy helplessly, reaching out again as he sees Kane go down, but Kane cannot bear to feel Bellamy touch him.  Not with the dusky necklace of bruises blossoming against the skin of Bellamy’s neck.  Not when his hands can still feel the sensation of slowly, slowly crushing Bellamy’s windpipe, when the memory of how calmly and carefully he tried to choke the life out of him is still so fresh in his mind.  Even a gesture as simple as reaching out a hand to stop him from falling is too much for Kane to bear.

He windmills backward, ungainly, off-balance, and everyone in the room is frozen in horror as the tableau plays out in slow-motion.  But Abby feels him begin to fall even before he does and she’s there just in time.

She looks so small beside him, so bruised and fragile.  But she catches him in her arms, she holds him up, she steps in between grief and gravity to stop the fall.  The cold ground doesn’t catch him.  He falls, instead, into her.

His knees give out almost immediately – he’s trembling, breathing hard, like he’s drowning – and she sinks down with him onto the floor, pulling him close.  His harsh, racking sobs are terrible to hear, and the others don’t know what to do.

Bellamy looks at Clarke.

Emori looks at Murphy.

Bryan looks at Miller.

Clarke looks at Abby.

But Abby doesn’t see any of them.  Abby’s eyes are closed, her head bent over Kane’s, her tangled hair a curtain around his contorted, broken face.

The room empties.  The sun sets.

The six-months-to-doomsday clock starts ticking.

But Abby is aware of nothing except the man she holds in her arms and the raw, fractured cracking of her heart at every ragged, gasping sob out of his lungs.

She presses her mouth against his hair, over and over again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "tending an injury"

They fall asleep there, on the throne room floor.

Abby hears Marcus’ breathing begin to slow and soften, the ragged rough edges smoothing out as the tangle of his sobs unravels into exhaustion.  She lowers him to the cold tiles and rests her head on his chest.

Within minutes, they’re sound asleep.

The others leave them alone, unsure what to do.  They make camp for the night in empty rooms all over the tower, but everyone is afraid to penetrate the dark cloud of grief that runs from the scars on Marcus Kane’s wrists to the ones on Bellamy Blake’s throat.

Everyone, that is, but Bellamy.

They don’t hear him come back an hour later, carrying a blanket and pillow stolen from Lexa’s bed.  They don’t feel him kneel beside them and carefully lift Kane’s head to place the pillow beneath it, or drape a heavy fur coverlet over their bodies to take off the night chill.

(In the morning, Marcus will think it was Abby and Abby will think it was Clarke, and no one will speak of it ever again.)

Marcus sleeps heavy and dreamless and wakes feeling more like himself, though he still can’t look at anyone and he flinches at the sound of Bellamy’s voice.  And something has shifted overnight between him and Abby, too, a kind of tight, tense mortification at his own weakness rising up around him.  He doesn’t say anything about it, but he tends to leave rooms that she is in as quickly as possible. 

The only person he seems to feel like himself around is Clarke.

So Abby lets him be for most of the day, sequestered in the Commander’s war room with Clarke and the handful of Grounder ambassadors who managed to survive Ontari.  She can swallow her worry back down, a little, by staying busy.

There is so much to do.

Jackson can’t look her in the eye, at first, but there isn’t time for that.  Polis is full of wounded and injured people and she needs his hands alongside hers.  So instead of tentatively navigating the maze of his guilt, she slices right through it.  “Come here,” she says firmly, and takes him in her arms, and holds him there for a long moment, and it’s a little better after that.  He’s steadier, somehow.  He’s Jackson again.

It won’t be that easy with Marcus.  But it helps, to have Jackson back.

They work all day.  Thelonious is in terrible shape, though Abby can’t quite bear to feel as compassionate as she knows she should.  There are others that have it worse; Indra and two Grounders on the crosses outside the tower were taken down last night, once Miller’s rope ladder down the elevator shaft was stable enough to climb.  They spent the night in a ground floor storage room, and Abby follows Jackson down the ladder to help tend them.

There’s something so centering in the simplicity of this work.  It’s not delicate, like surgery, or unpredictable, like treating an illness.  There are wounds in their hands and feet which need to be cleaned and wrapped with fresh white bandages and once that is done, it’s done.  Indra will have her sword hand back in a matter of weeks.

It feels good, to be able to fix something.

Bellamy, she can see, feels the same. He was down here all night and all day with Murphy, Emori, and several dozen Grounders, all of whom are endearingly proud of their rudimentary elevator – a rough, open wooden platform attached to a winch in the ceiling with whatever knotted-together fragments of rope survived the blast.  It can really only carry one person at a time, unless they can get the ground floor machinery cobbled back together, but at least they’re no longer trapped in a crumbling, wind-swept tower at the very top of the world.

She lets them haul her back up to test it (clinging to Miller’s rope ladder all the while, just in case) and the distant echo of their excited murmuring floating up from below brings her closer to smiling than she thought, yesterday, she would ever find herself again.

Something has been repaired.

* * *

She doesn’t knock when she enters, just silently pushes open the door.  They’re deep in conversation over Lexa’s map table, heads bent close together, voices low.  She indulges herself as long as possible, watching them in silence, heart turning over and over inside her chest. 

The upward tilt of Clarke’s chin when she asks him a question so she can meet his gaze head-on, thoughtful and serious.  The easy, effortless way he lets his hand settle on her shoulder as he leans down to point something out to her on the map.

They have something Abby doesn’t.  They’re suited for this in a way she never was.

They simply … click.

It’s like a painting, she thinks, desperate affection pulsing through her bloodstream to fill her entire body.  How beautiful they are.  _The Princess and the Chancellor._ Warm amber sunlight pouring in from every window, burnishing two bent heads - one dark, one light - lifting in unison with perfect symmetry as they both become aware of her at the same time.  Two brows furrowed in annoyance at the interruption, then clearing when they realize it’s Abby.

Clarke beckons her in, while Marcus - as predicted - tenses up and moves away, but Abby has arrived prepared.

“I just need a moment,” she tells her daughter, holding up the med kit and bowl of water she has brought with her.  “I need to take a look at his hands.”

“I’m fine,” he says quickly, but Clarke is already moving, giving her mother’s shoulder a comforting – and perceptive – squeeze as she slips silently out and closes the door behind her.  

“I can take care of it,” he insists again, his voice rough and almost aggressive, but she isn’t fooled.

She knows exactly why he can’t bear for her to touch him.

“Give me your hands,” she orders him firmly, refusing to take no for an answer, and after a moment, he yields, letting her seat him in a low chair with a small table beside it, where she sets down the bowl of water and cloth.

His bandages are filthy, ragged, stained with blood and tied in haphazard knots.  She kneels at his feet and takes his right hand in both of hers, carefully picking at the knots until the yellowed fabric falls open, then resting the dented metal bowl on his knees to let the warm clear water bathe his hand.

“Abby,” he whispers hoarsely, but she doesn’t stop, she doesn’t look up, her entire world has shrunk down to the size of Marcus Kane’s right hand submerged in this bowl of water and the way it feels to run a soft, clean white cloth over the scarred roughness of his skin, watching the caked dirt and grime and dried blood slowly vanish.  Some of it is taken by the water.  Some of it transfers from his skin to the cloth, and she imagines it going in both directions – the white cloth takes away the blood on his hands, and his hands take its cleanness in return, like a baptism. 

He says her name again as she lets the cloth drop into the water, holding his clean hand in her own, caressing his palm with her fingers.

He flinches, inhaling sharply, as she gently pours antiseptic over the raw angry gash through his wrist, and for a moment it undoes her completely.  She flashes back, just for a moment, to the cross and the hammer and the nail and the hoarse, pleading agony in his voice as he begged her to _wake up._

But the storm passes over, and in a moment he’s breathing normally again, so she does too.  

She wraps a snowy white bandage around his wrist, bound firmly to keep the wound safe and clean, and there are suddenly so many things she wants to say but no words to say them.

He says her name a third time, and finally she looks up to meet his eyes, his hand still held tightly in both of hers.  She doesn’t say anything, but holds his hand up to her lips and presses a kiss against his palm.

He starts, but doesn’t pull away.

They sit there like that in silence for a long time.  She bathes and dresses his left hand, too, with the same precise and diligent care, but this time when she lifts it to kiss his sun-roughened skin, something happens. 

Her lips brush his palm, and she feels him shift towards her, almost imperceptibly.  She closes her eyes and lets her mouth linger against his skin as his other hand comes up to stroke her hair, and then his hands are cupping her jaw, tilting her chin up to meet his gaze.  The chair is low, and her eyes are nearly level with his as she kneels beside him, and the silence is thick with unspoken words hanging so heavily in the air that they seem to have a palpable weight, but _“thank you”_ is all he can say.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "what are we, really?"

She sees the caravan return from Polis around midday.

They brought the wounded back to Arkadia first, accompanied by those with any medical expertise – Skaikru or Grounder (not that those divisions matter anymore, with six months left before the world ends).  Nyko comes back with them, and it’s bittersweet to think that Lincoln’s vision for a shared hospital might, in its own way, come to fruition after all.  

John Murphy wanders into Medical one day to deliver some boxes and muttered sarcasm, but he stays to hold a splint in place while Jackson bandages a broken femur, and after that it’s as though he’s always been there.  He has no training, but he’s smart and learns fast.  And perhaps after watching her crack Ontari’s chest open to pump her sticky black heart back to life by hand, Abby has done what none of the other adults on the Ark were ever able to accomplish: earned Murphy’s respect.  After a week, no one can remember how they got anything done without him.

They’re in surgery when she hears the Rovers and her heart begins to thump in her chest.  It’s been two and a half weeks since she bandaged Kane’s wrists in Lexa’s map room, the last moment they had alone; he stayed behind with Clarke and the ambassadors while she and Jackson took the wounded home.

But she knows (without knowing how she knows it) that Marcus is in one of those Rovers.  She can feel him moving towards her over the horizon.  She can sense his presence like a storm coming, a physical thing pulsing an electrical charge through the air.

Will he come to her? 

She waits all day, heart pounding, jumpy as a cat.  Murphy, who sees more than he lets on, watches her carefully but says nothing.  Even Jackson looks up, startled, at the way she can’t sit still every time a pair of footsteps passes down the hallway outside Medical.

But he doesn’t come.

By the time she finishes with her last patient, it’s been dark for hours with no sign of him.  (She could ask Bellamy, of course, but she isn’t sure she trusts herself not to give away more than she intends.  She isn’t sure she can keep her voice steady if she says his name.)

He isn’t in the hangar with the Rovers, and he isn’t in the Chancellor’s office, and – despite what it costs her in heart-pounding anxiety to knock on that particular door – he isn’t in his quarters, either.

She steels herself to face the crowd around the fire pit, hoping to find someone – anyone – who can tell her if Marcus Kane came home, and where to find him.

But halfway across the grass, barely visible in the darkness, a lone shadow beneath the Arkadia guard tower renders her questions unnecessary.

He sits so far away from the noise and bustle of homecoming that the firelight doesn’t even touch him.  She approaches slowly, eyes adjusting to the dark, watching as his hand traces a jagged abstract shape on the dark ground, and she suddenly remembers a thing she ought all along to have known:

That by the time it happened, Marcus was already gone.

She sits down beside him, but doesn’t speak.  There’s nothing to say, anyway.  There are no words for the way her heart clenches up tightly inside her watching Marcus trace his finger around the dark shadow of a bloodstain, as they sit in silence on the spot where Lincoln kom Trikru died.

“I didn’t stop him,” he says dully, without looking at her, and she takes his hand in hers, pulling it away from sketching weary, endless circles in the dirt around the last traces of Lincoln they have left.

“He made a choice, Marcus.  You were never meant to stop him.  He wanted you to get Octavia away safely, and you did that.  You gave him the best gift you could.”

“He turned himself in to die,” Marcus murmurs, “and I didn’t stop him.”

She says nothing, just squeezes his hand and leans in to rest her head on his shoulder.

“How long after,” he begins abruptly, then stops himself. He isn’t sure, Abby senses, whether he really wants to know.

“Three or four days,” she tells him, adding, almost defensively, “they were going to kill Raven if I didn’t.”

He nods, grimly unsurprised.  “With Clarke gone, Raven was my first guess,” he says.  “Or Jackson.” 

She turns to him sharply, astonishment in her eyes, and even in the dark she can see the shadow of a smile tug at the corner of his mouth.  “Of course I knew,” he reproaches her gently. “Of _course_ you took the chip to save someone else.  You wouldn’t be Abby Griffin if you didn’t.”

A weight she’s been carrying for so long she’d forgotten how to live without it is lifted abruptly from her shoulders, and her eyes fill with tears.  “Marcus,” she starts to say, “I’m so – “

He shakes his head.  “It wasn’t us, Abby,” he reminds her.  “We have to hold onto that.  We have to remember.  Those things we did.  It wasn’t _us.”_  He presses her hand in his, and they sit there in silence for a long moment before he speaks again.

“Every minute of that day is burned into my memory,” he says heavily, and the way he looks back down at the dark shadow on the rocky ground she knows what day he means.  “I keep thinking it’s all some terrible dream.  I keep thinking I’ll wake up in that prison cell with Lincoln still alive.”

“And Charles Pike, too,” Abby adds, tightening her grip on his hand as he swallows hard and looks away.

“Do you think, after everything that happened,” he asks her, a tremor in his voice.  “After Indra. The tower.  After the things ALIE did.  Surely, after all of that, he would have – don’t you think he would have – “

“Yes,” she says firmly, not because she knows it – not because she has proof – not because she can show him any evidence that the Charles Pike who came home from Polis would have been the Charles Pike Marcus knew and loved on the Ark once more – but because this is who they are to each other. His doubts are salved by her faith. And even here, on the spot where he shot Lincoln, Abby can feel a spark of that faith in the good man Charles Pike might have become again.

It doesn’t bring Charles back.  It doesn’t wash the blood off his hands.  But it heals something inside Marcus, just a little, to believe that redemption could have been possible if he’d only been given the chance.

“It haunts me too,” she confesses.  “The things that happened that day.  It all disappeared when I took the chip, but afterwards – “

“It came back clearer than before,” he finishes for her, and she nods.  “I’ll never forget the look on Octavia’s face,” he murmurs, hand tightening again in hers as he stares out into the darkness towards the gates of Arkadia, and her heart cracks in two at the way his jaw clenches. How well she recognizes that look. It’s been her own, so many times.  Too many to count.  How many days on the Ark, starting at the sound whenever she heard a young girl’s voice, hoping against hope that they might let Clarke out of prison?  How many nights out here in the darkness, watching those same gates for a flash of blonde hair moving out of the shadows?  How many times has she been through this, waiting for her daughter to come home?

She doesn’t offer him false comfort.  She doesn’t tell him he did everything he could have done. She doesn’t tell him the choices Octavia made are not his fault.  She doesn’t tell him it will be all right.  She knows better than to tell a worried parent any of those things.  

She simply sits with him, and holds his hand.

It’s silent for a long moment after that, before she says the very unexpected thing she says next.

“Marcus,” she says to him.  “Are we _ever_ going to talk about that kiss?”

It’s the absolute last thing in all the world he expected her to say, and he’s so startled that he drops her hand.  He turns to her, eyes wide with confusion and surprise, and she realizes it’s the first time all night long that he’s stopped thinking about Lincoln and Octavia.

“You kissed me,” she informs him, and it comes out just the faintest bit accusatory.  

“Yes,” he concedes uncertainly.  “I did.”

“And then you left, and we never talked about it again.”

He squints at her a little in the dark, examining her closely, trying to read her, trying to weigh his options and guess blindly at what the right response might be, but she’s flustered him so badly that he falls back on the answer an adolescent might give, pivoting evasively to turn it back onto her.

“Well, you kissed me too,” he retorts.  “In Polis.”

“That was ALIE.”

“Was it _all_ ALIE?” he asks, and the direct question flusters her suddenly.  She meets his eyes then, and can’t look away.  He’s pinning her in place with his gaze, and she can’t give him anything but the truth.

“No,” she confesses.  “There was … some of it was – I wanted – “  Her eyes well up with tears suddenly, brought on by that wave of anger, terror, guilt and revulsion that rushes over her when she remembers how it felt to have ALIE inside her mind. 

“You wanted to,” he says in a low voice, full of wonder, and she nods.

“But not like that,” she whispers.  “Not cold and empty, like that.  I couldn’t _feel_ anything, Marcus.  It haunts me. To be so near you, to be held by you, to kiss you, but not to _feel_ anything … It’s terrifying, to remember it.  It was like being hollow.  Like something inside me had been taken away.  When you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re remembering the things you did,” she explains, and the stunned look on her face tells her she’s right.  “But what I remember is how I _felt._ Walking around with a piece of myself missing, and ALIE inside me in its place.”  Her voice begins to rise, emotion overtaking her, the memories too strong now to resist.  “I kissed you and I felt _nothing_ ,” she tells him, voice rough and desperate, rising to something like panic.  “You and I – even in our worst moments – even that day at the airlock – I always _felt something._  Even if it was anger.  You always did something to me.  I always felt.  And when she took that away I – “

She stops short, seeing his wide, stunned eyes, and it hits her with a violent shock just how much she’s revealed.  She looks away, suddenly vulnerable, almost afraid, and she can feel him watching her but he doesn’t press any further.

“Okay, then,” he says gently.  “So where do we go from here?” 

She doesn’t answer right away.  Instead, she finds herself looking around them, turning back over her shoulder to see Jackson and Murphy leaving Medical together, passing a flask back and forth, coming to join the others at the fire pit.  She sees David Miller drinking a cup of coffee, Nathan sitting on one side of him and Bryan on the other, a tiny oasis of family serenity.  She sees Monty and Jasper, walking together, deep in quiet conversation.  She sees Raven leave the fire pit to join Bellamy at the little herb garden by the back gate of the hangar that Gina used to tend every morning.

“We start over,” she declares.  “We rebuild from the ground up.  Not just you and me.  All of us.  Lincoln would want us to.”

“Abby, if we only have – “

“Don’t.”

“No, but if we only have six months left, I don’t want to waste any more of it.  If the world ends – “

“It won’t,” she says firmly, and against his will, he almost laughs.

“You seem very sure of that,” he observes, and she shrugs.

“I’m always sure.”

“Yes,” he says dryly, “and it’s gotten us both into trouble more than once.  You’ve been wrong before.”

“This time I won’t be,” she insists heatedly, and the passion in her voice is incandescent.  “Like hell am I going to let the world end on my watch, Marcus Kane.  Not now that I have you to fight for.”

He turns to look at her, eyes wide, startled, shining with some deep emotion flickering in their warm brown depths, and the word neither of them can speak just yet wraps itself around them and draws their bodies closer.  “What are you saying, Abby?” he murmurs, and she doesn’t answer, but leans in close to press her lips softly against his cheek.  He closes his eyes, tears glittering on his dark lashes.  

“We’ll build the world Lincoln wanted,” she murmurs, rising up to her feet and resting her hand on his shoulder.  “You and I.  All of us. Together.”

He covers her hand with his own, just for a moment, but doesn’t look up.  His eyes are locked, once again, on the dark shadow where Lincoln’s fight was ended.  

 _“Yu gonplei ste odon,”_ Marcus murmurs, reading the thoughts from her mind, and she stands there beside him for a long moment, running her fingers soothingly through his soft dark hair as he bows his head. 

When he finally breaks the silence, she recognizes the cadence, even though the words are foreign to her, and she mouths it in English along with him, her low voice a soft countermelody to his.

“ _Kom chilnes yu na ban sishou-de au,_  
_Kom hodnes yu na hon neson op._  
 _Gouthru klir hashta yu soujon,_  
 _Kom oso las soujon ona graun-de.”_

He stops for a moment, swallows hard, and looks up at the blanket of stars in the night sky before he can speak the final line.  “ _Mebi oso na hit choda op nodotaim,”_ he says to Lincoln, and Abby’s eyes well up with tears as she says it too.

_“May we meet again.”_


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "a kiss of relief"

She doesn’t expect to see him again until morning, so she’s startled out of bed by his knock less than an hour later.  Her heart beats a little faster as she rises to make her way through the pitch blackness towards the door – she can feel even through the wall of metal that it’s him and the discordant clash of sensations rushing through her body overwhelms her – but there’s nothing amorous in the way he stands stiff and tense in the gray cold hallway, and she suddenly understands.

“It’s too quiet, isn’t it?” she guesses, but it isn’t a question.  He collapses a little, gratefully, and nods, relieved to be spared an unwieldy explanation. 

After that first night on the throne room floor, she slept in Lexa’s bed with Clarke, holding her close in a vain hope of keeping her daughter’s ghosts at bay.  Marcus, along with Bellamy and David Miller, moved into the barracks on the lower floors, making camp on spare bunks and bedrolls with Lexa’s guards.  He spent weeks in Polis surrounded by a crowded mass of humanity, and now he’s back home with nothing but silence in his empty bedroom.  There is no one to keep the ghosts away from Marcus Kane.

“Come in,” she says, stepping back to let him through the door, and she sees his shoulders slump in relief the moment he steps over the threshold.

He’s been inside her quarters before, to drop off files for review or to bring her dinner on nights she couldn’t make it out of Medical before the kitchen closed.  But it’s different now, at twenty minutes to midnight, with moonlight streaming in through the room’s high window, and a brass lamp burnishing the room in dim amber light.  It’s different with Abby dressed for bed in the faded cotton slip Gina brought back from Mount Weather for her, a warm dusty color that might once have been rose, her caramel-gold hair falling in loose waves around the shoulders he’s never seen bared before.  It’s different with Marcus barefoot in soft gray cotton pants and a threadbare t-shirt, standing in her doorway without any of his armor on.

He hasn’t come here for … well, for _that._

But it’s different anyway.

There’s a clumsy bit of business about who takes which side of the bed, followed by a minor collision as Abby reaches over him to switch out the light, and a moment of uncertainty on both parts as to how close or far apart they ought to be.  After all is said and done – pillows adjusted, blankets arranged, tossing and turning completed, awkward “goodnights” said – they find themselves on opposite sides of an invisible wall, not touching, very nearly as far apart as either of them can be without falling off the bed onto the floor.

But they can hear each other breathing, and it’s enough, for now, just to know that someone else is here.

Abby falls asleep first, soothed by the familiar sensation of once again having the warm weight of a man in her bed.  Marcus smells different from Jake, breathes differently even, and he’s all the way over on the other side instead of curled up behind her with his face buried in her hair. 

But he’s _here._  Someone is _here._  

The cobwebby gray curtain of loneliness lifts from around her, and she falls asleep smiling.

It doesn’t last.

Marcus drifts off shortly after Abby does, breathing in the pine and rosemary scent of her hair.  It makes him think of forests, of loamy brown earth and rustling green leaves and the clearing where he planted the Eden Tree for his mother.  Marcus likes the forest.  It clears his head.  He closes his eyes and drifts off and breathes Abby in and then he’s there, walking through the quiet rain-scented woods with his mother, watching Vera Kane fall in love with Earth.

He hasn’t dreamed about anything so pleasant in longer than he can remember – it’s the first night since he woke from the City of Light without a single nightmare – but Abby isn’t so lucky.  He bolts awake a heartbeat after she does, ripped from sleep by the sound of her choked, violent gasping.

“Abby,” he says urgently, but she doesn’t hear him, chest heaving, hair a tangled curtain obscuring her face.  She’s shaking, desperately straining for breath, and her eyes are glazed over as though she doesn’t know where she is.

 _This is a panic attack,_ says Abby’s crisp, sensible voice inside his mind, and he hears her giving him instructions as though she’s standing right beside him.

“Abby, you need to breathe,” he says, taking her by the shoulders with a firm but gentle grip.  Her head snaps up, her eyes blank and unseeing, and she tries to pull away but he stays with her.  “Abby, breathe with me,” he says, keeping his voice low and calm, propping her up against the headboard to sit upright.  She’s pliant, unresisting, like a doll.  He kneels between her open thighs, getting as close to her as he can, and cradles her face in his hands.  “I need you to breathe with me, okay?” he says, and takes a long, deep, slow breath, then releases it.  “Like that,” he instructs her.  “Breathe with me.  In and out.  In and out.”

The fog inside her eyes clears, just a little.  “Marcus?” she manages to rasp between huge gulping breaths, and he nods, smiling, to reassure her.

“It’s me.  I’m right here.  You’re okay.  Everything’s okay.  Breathe with me, Abby, just keep breathing.  You’re doing good.  You’re doing really good.  In and out, just like that.”

He doesn’t know how long it takes before the small white shoulders stop trembling, before the tearing, gasping sounds soften and ease back down into slow, gentle breaths.  It feels like a long time. But he stays with her, cradling her strong narrow jaw in his big hands, his warm deep inhales and exhales a tether to carry her back down to earth.

When she finally returns to herself, he realizes that she’s crying.

“It was a dream,” he tells her firmly, reassuringly.  “Whatever it was.  Whatever frightened you.  You were having a nightmare, that’s all.”

“Marcus,” she croaks out, her voice rusty and hollow, but he shakes his head, brushing the hair out of her eyes.

“It was just a dream,” he tells her again.  “You’re okay.  I’m here.  I’m right here.”

He means it to be comforting but he’s stunned when he sees tears begin to flow down her face.  “You’re here,” she repeats, voice raw with emotion, and then her hands are on his face, pulling him in close.  “You’re _here_.”

“Abby – “

“You were dead,” she tells him in a cracked whisper.  “I dreamed – I was afraid – you were dead, and I – I was the one … “

“You didn’t,” he reassures her, “You didn’t.  I’m right here, Abby.  We survived.  We’re here.”

“It was so real,” she murmurs in a daze, “the cross and the hammer and the nails – but it wasn’t your wrists, it was your _heart,_ and it was me, I did it, _I did it to you – “_

Her breath is beginning to rise with panic again, so he moves in close, so near their foreheads are nearly touching, and begins to breathe for her again, prompting her to follow - which, finally, she does. 

After a few minutes he feels her begin to collapse a little, panic giving way to a bone-deep weariness, muscles unknitting after tense exertion, and it’s simply impossible for him to let her go back to the other side of the bed alone after that.  He sinks back down onto the mattress and guides her down with him, wrapping his arms around her back, pulling her close as she she buries her face in his chest.  He holds her there for a long, long time, stroking her back with soothing hands and murmuring softly into her hair.

“I’m here,” he reassures her over and over again.  “Everything’s going to be okay.  It was a dream.  I’m right here.”

He waits to feel her melt slowly towards sleep again in his arms, breath becoming quiet and regular, before he permits himself to let go again, sinking down into oblivion with her.  And the last thing he remembers before exhaustion overtakes him is a soft brush of warm dry lips against his own, so impossibly light and delicate that he doesn’t know whether or not he dreamed it.

He holds her all night.

They don’t bother with opposite sides of the bed, after that.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "can you write a one shot about abby being comfortable napping around marcus and him taking care of her and stuff??"

Something shifts between them after that night, faint and almost imperceptible, nothing that either of them can pinpoint or name. A subtle wisp of a thing, always just out of reach, but it’s _there_ , and it suddenly makes everything different.

It’s something, Abby finds herself thinking in maddeningly vague terms, to do with the way Marcus suddenly … takes up _space._

She’s always been aware of him – even at his worst, he’s a difficult man to ignore – but there’s something new there now, a hair-trigger sensitivity to each other they can’t seem to switch off.  If he hears her across the room take a sharp deep breath, his head snaps up as if readying for another panic attack. If she’s working a shift alone in Medical after Jackson and Murphy are off for the night, he comes by to check on her or brings his tablet in with him and works from the desk in the corner.  She can feel him watching her, but it’s not like it was on the Ark.  Not a threat, but a comfort. 

Marcus _sees_ her.

And she sees him, too.  He can feel her gaze whenever he talks to Bellamy, around whom he‘s still sometimes skittish.  Bellamy too is gentle with Marcus, reassuring, careful.  The bruises are almost faded, you have to look carefully, and Bellamy puts his jacket on before coming into the Chancellor’s office, which hides everything but the faint mark of one thumb beneath his Adam’s apple.  But every once in awhile, Marcus will make a sudden movement - say, to catch a glass of water that’s about to tip over - and Bellamy’s whole body will flinch and tighten like a spooked horse preparing to bolt, and then a crushing sadness will descend onto Marcus’ shoulders, causing his whole body to sink beneath its weight.  They stare at each other in silence, desperate mute apology contorting both their faces - Kane for the bruise he now can’t ignore, Bellamy for reminding him of it - until Abby steps in.  He doesn’t see the bruise if Abby’s hand is resting on his arm, if her knee bumps lightly against his own under the table.  If he loses his train of thought, her touch steadies him and brings him back to himself.  Bellamy never says anything about it - never gives any indication that he even sees - but she observes him saving his visits to the Chancellor’s office for when he knows that Abby is there too.

There’s an _intimacy_ between them that never existed before, and everyone around them can see it.  They’re attuned to each other in some peculiar new way that can only come from sharing a bed with somebody.

He comes to her every night, after that first one. He always knocks, polite, almost formal.  He never presumes.  They’re shy with each other, hesitant and a little fumbling, up until the moment when Marcus wraps his arms around Abby’s waist and her back melts into his strong, comforting chest and then it’s as though they’ve been doing this all their lives.

Marcus snores, but just a little, and after a few days Abby can’t remember how she ever fell asleep without it, that warm dry whuffling of breath against her hair, like the happy panting of a big friendly dog.  She herself tends to fidget in her sleep, tugging the covers away and leaving Marcus chilled, but he learns that if he runs his hands up and down her arms, it soothes her into stillness again.

They adjust.

The line is there between them, and they don’t cross it for now, but they’re _aware_ of it – when Marcus wakes to find his hand resting high on Abby’s chest with the tip of one finger just brushing the plush softness of her breast, or when Abby stirs in her sleep and feels a hard heavy weight swelling gently against her thigh. But neither of them is ready, just yet, to dive off that particular cliff.  There’s too much _gravity_ between them; once they left themselves fall, they’d never stop falling.  It’s all still too much, too soon.

So for now, it’s this: comfortable nights of warm arms and easy slumber, all the ghosts chased just far enough away that they can sleep.  It’s Marcus bringing her food when she works through meal hours and wildflowers in tin cups to brighten her room.  It’s Abby doing her equipment inventory on the couch in the Chancellor’s office when she can sense that Marcus needs company.

Marcus doesn’t tell Abby about the recurring nightmare that only her small warm body in his arms has been able to chase away – the one where it’s _her_ who stays behind to pull the lever as the stations crash down to Earth, trapped and alone on a dying Ark where he’ll never see her face again.

And Abby doesn’t tell Marcus about how the panic attacks really started.

* * *

The guards didn’t come for Clarke until twenty-four hours (to the minute) after Jake was floated.  Abby hadn’t even known about the charges.  No one ever told her why Clarke was given a day’s reprieve, but she put the pieces together anyway.

It was Wells.

Thelonious had intended to give Clarke and Abby an hour together after they came home from the airlock before sending Shumway for her, but Wells had apparently (according to one of Abby’s patients a few months later, who lived down the hall from the Jahas and made loud chatty conversation while Abby administered her vaccine) “lost his shit.”  Brooking no argument, he demanded that his father, out of the bare minimum of human decency, for the sake of the decades of friendship the Griffins had shown to them, allow Abby to grieve her husband and Clarke her father together, just for one day, before forcibly separating them for what might be the last time.  

Maybe it was because Wells, all things considered, really asked his father for very little (never was a Chancellor’s child less entitled).  Maybe it was out of compassion for the Griffins.  Maybe he simply wanted to avoid a fight.  But whatever the reason, Thelonious did it.

That first night - which they had no idea was also the last - Clarke slept in her parents’ bed next to Abby, their arms curled tightly around each other.  They did not cry.  There were no tears left, just a blank hollow gray void swallowing them both up from the inside out.  They simply held each other and tried to remember how to breathe.

The nightmare seized Abby as she began to drift off to sleep, and she suddenly felt all the air drain from her lungs as though it had been _herself_ in that airlock, _herself_ pulled backwards into the unrelenting void of space, _herself_ dying a choking airless death.  She had never dreamed anything so real.  She didn’t realize she was gasping and shaking until she felt a panicked, teary Clarke wrap her in her arms whispering “Mom! Mom, please, you have to wake up” over and over again.

The attacks came almost nightly while Clarke was in the Sky Box. It was having too much time to think, and too much solitude.  It sent her mind spiraling into dark and ugly places. But she’d had surprisingly few of them since the Ark hit the ground.  Something to do with keeping busy, she suspected, with being surrounded by people, with having a _purpose_ ; she couldn’t afford to fall apart while they were still hunting for the missing kids, or at war with Mount Weather.  

And then after that, there had been Marcus.

The shadows receded – not completely, but enough to let her breathe – when Marcus was there.

She does not tell him this.  

But she thinks, perhaps, he understands anyway.

* * *

The night it happens, they’re working late in the Chancellor’s office.  

Marcus is at his desk, going over the evacuation plan for the Grounder villages surrounding Arkadia.  Clarke returned four days ago from Polis with Commander Luna and King Roan to meet with the Skaikru Council and devise a plan for long-term relocation to the ninety-six-square mile patch of territory in the middle of Azgeda that Raven’s computer model has determined will remain untouched by the coming disaster - far enough in all directions from any of the failing nuclear plants to retain clean water and arable land.

Marcus has been up late every night this week staring at maps of soil patterns and water tables.  Abby, for her part, is working with Nyko on preserving as many of the area’s medicinal plants and herbs as they can harvest in six months, and is poring over a nineteenth-century medical almanac downloaded from Mount Weather to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

Both of them are exhausted to the point of delirium, but focusing on concrete manageable tasks – “draw a map,” “make a list of plants” – helps take their mind of the ticking six-month clock hanging over their heads every day.

Marcus sees Abby, who is sitting with her feet up on the couch, begin to fade a little.  The tablet in her hand slips out and thuds gently onto the floor as her head lolls back against the soft upholstered back.  She’s so tired.  She can hardly keep her eyes open.

“Time for bed?” she hears Marcus ask dryly, but she shakes her head, snuggling down further against the couch cushions.  The thought of standing up and walking all the way through camp to her quarters and undressing for bed exhausts her even to consider it. He chuckles a little, and she’s soothed into a pleasant half-sleep by the sound of his fingers tapping on the screen of his tablet, the scratching of a pencil on Roan’s map spread out across his desk, and his warm, steady breathing.

She could live in this moment forever, she thinks.  Just now, the crisis at their doorstep feels very far away.  Just now, she feels nothing but peace.

A blissful drowsiness overtakes her limbs, pulling her down little by little into a dark sea, and just as she feels the surface begin to close over her head, consuming her completely in a deep sweet sleep, she hears him say her name.

“Abby,” he murmurs in a voice so low she can barely hear him, “are you asleep?”

She isn’t, not really.  She’s only _mostly_ asleep.  But her eyes are too heavy to open and her limbs are too heavy to move and she can’t quite remember how words are formed in her mouth, so all she can do is sigh a little and let her head sink back further against the back of the couch.

He calls out to her again, closer this time, and she feels a shifting.  He’s lifted her away from the corner of the couch to sit down beside her, pulling her into his lap.  Still liquid and boneless inside that place between sleeping and waking, she yields completely as he resettles her in his arms, her legs stretched out along the sofa cushions and her head pillowed against his chest as he strokes her hair.

She likes this much better, and wants to tell him so, but again, she’s too tired for words or movement, so she simply melts into him and begins to drift off again.

“Abby?” he tries again, after a long silence, but she’s floating away and it’s too late for him to catch her. 

“Okay,” she hears him say, with a curious throb in his voice.  “Maybe it’s better this way.  Maybe this is easier.”

Something in his voice arrests her, tugging her back abruptly as she drifts away, like a ship dropping anchor.  The fog begins to recede.  

“I didn’t know what this was,” he murmurs, his voice heavy with some strange emotion, and suddenly she’s wide awake.  

She forces her breath back down to the slow pace of sleep and presses her eyes closed, heart pounding inside her like a military drum, thumping so violently she’s half terrified he’ll feel it and know.  But she can’t move now.  She can’t speak, now.  She has to hear what he’s going to say.  

“I didn’t know what it was,” he says again in a low voice, brushing a strand of hair from her face.  “I swear to God, Abby, I didn’t know.  From the moment we came to Earth, I knew I couldn’t live without you but I didn’t know _why.”_

His hand drifts down to the place where her right arm is draped over her hip, and he strokes the soft white skin of her forearm.  “You tried to say … something …  to me, that day.  But I thought it would just make everything harder, if that was how it all ended.  And then I kissed you, before I left on a suicide mission.  Without knowing if I’d ever see you again.  And then I found you in Polis, but ALIE had gotten there first.  And now we only have six months until the world ends.”  He laughs a little, but there’s more melancholy in it than mirth.  “Six months,” he says again, sadly.  “We never had good timing.”  He leans down to rest his head against hers.  “But I think I’m in love with you,” he murmurs, in a voice pulsing with tenderness and wonder.  “I think that’s what this is.  Because everything’s different now.”  

His hand slides up the side of her body and for one thrilling, shocked moment she thinks he’s going to caress her breasts while she sleeps – an almost incomprehensible thing for Marcus Kane to do – but no, his fingertips brush past them, his touch light and respectful, and land instead on her ring.

“I’ll never ask you for anything that rightfully should still belong to him,” he murmurs into her hair, and Abby presses her eyes closed tight, suddenly terrified the tears she’s struggling to hold back will give her away.  “I’ll never ask you for that.  I just thought … “  He stops for a moment, turning Jake’s ring on its chain over and over in his hand.  “It’s the kind of thing a person should say, I think,” he says haltingly.  “Not for you to say it back.  Not if that isn’t – what this is.  For you.  But just so I know I’ve said it.”

Abby can’t breathe.

He lets go of the ring and pulls her close, cradling her body against his chest.  “Whether it’s six months or fifty more years,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss against her forehead.  “You’re the last woman I’ll ever love, either way.  But I couldn’t let the world end without saying it.”

He reaches over her and switches off the lamp beside them, leans back against the sofa, and in minutes he’s sound asleep, arms holding Abby tight against his chest.

She feels the rise and fall of his chest and the thump of his heart beneath her cheek begin to slow and soften, and only then – once she knows he’s asleep – does she let the stinging hot tears cascade silently down her face.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "a drunken kiss"

Abby wakes long before dawn, stiff from sleeping upright, salt streaks running down her cheeks where her tears had dried in the night. Marcus is snoring soundly, one arm draped over the back of the sofa and one lying comfortably across her knees.  

If he wakes now, here in the darkness, he’ll look at her and know that she heard what he said.  She has no defenses up and no answer ready.  

_I think I’m in love with you._

She has to get out of here.

Carefully, gingerly, she lifts his lifeless arm to slide her legs out from beneath it, shifting her weight to climb out of his lap. She moves slowly, inch by inch, checking to see if he’s waking up.

But he sleeps on undisturbed.

She makes her way to the doorway on noiseless feet, turning for one last look at him.  His dark hair is sleep-mussed, his lashes a shadowy half-moon of pure black above the chiseled jut of his cheekbones.  The soft cotton of his shirt is rumpled, revealing, between its fraying hem and the waistband of his jeans, a sliver of pale skin – much paler than she expected.

Marcus doesn’t strip down to the waist when he’s working in the heat, the way the younger men do, and he always wears a shirt to sleep.  Abby has never seen that sliver of skin.  She can’t tear her eyes away from it.  She feels it suddenly swell and sharpen in importance, becoming symbolic of something she can’t quite understand.  She feels as though it’s the tip of an iceberg.  She’s known Marcus Kane all her life, she has cared for him deeply for months and months now, and for the past two weeks he’s shared her bed every night. But there are oceanic depths to him that she has never come anywhere close to reaching.  There are so many things left about him to discover.

She leans in the doorway and watches him sleep and it suddenly dawns on her, with piercing crystal clarity, that the entire story of Marcus Kane’s life is told in that slice of pale skin.  Raised on the Ark, under harsh fluorescent lights and artificial climate control, absorbing solar radiation but not the accompanying melanin. Everyone on the Ark was pale, but Marcus looked, and felt, more pale even than he was.  It was something to do with the austere darkness of his hair and clothes, the air of coldness that radiated from him.  He hadn’t always been so brittle and frosty - that was the product of Thelonious’ tutelage - though he’d always been reserved.  But then they crashed to Earth, they spent months under the warm sunlight, and the cold black-and-whiteness of him warmed into a rainbow of lush browns and grays.  On the Ark, his eyes looked dull and colorless to her, but here in the sun they’re the color of good rich soil, flickering with little amber lights in their depths.  His face, his neck, his arms are tanned by the sun and roughened with scars now, the marble pallor of his Ark days a thing of the past. 

But beneath his clothes, his Ark skin is still there – obscured first by the heavy black guard’s uniform he wore when they landed, and then afterwards by the weight of responsibility.  When peacetime came, and the young people of Arkadia stripped down to their underwear to leap with shrieks of joy into frigid lakes or lie shirtless in the grass to bask in the breezy warmth, Marcus Kane sat inside at a desk drawing maps and sketching supply routes and establishing Grounder treaties and supervising the building of a wall and a communication system and an electrical grid. He has the face and arms of a man who lives in the sun, but it doesn’t match the rest of him. 

That sliver of white skin is the cost of all the things he’s given up so everyone else can have them.  Peace of mind.  A day off. Sunlight.  That sliver of white skin belongs to a man who can’t slow down long enough to take one afternoon and lie outside in the grass, and yet never once has she heard him complain.  He simply does what needs to be done.

He carries so much on his shoulders.  He’s given up so much to keep everyone else alive.

She wants to climb back into his lap and put her arms around him and cradle him to her chest.

She wants to burst into tears.

She wants to kneel down beside him and press her mouth against that sliver of white skin. 

_Oh._

There it is, right in front of her, lighting up the sky like a shooting star, the thing she’s been trying to find the words for since he walked into that cold metal room with his hands and feet bound like a criminal and she realized she would never see him again.  She didn’t know how to come any closer than “I can’t do this again,” but the dizzying wave of emotions that washed over his face told her he knew exactly what she meant.

And then he said it to her - with the true words, the real words - though he doesn’t know she heard him.

She can feel those words pulsing inside her but doesn’t know how to speak them out loud yet. 

 _Don’t make this any harder than it already is,_ he had said to her the first time they thought death was about to separate them, and what if he was right?

She wonders how long they could go on like this.

_But I couldn’t let the world end without saying it._

She steps into the hallway and closes the door.

* * *

It’s Roan who suggests a public celebration, commemorating the unification of all thirteen clans – including Azgeda and Skaikru – into a true coalition with democratic leadership and a shared commitment to survival. Skaikru hosts the summit, as a show of good faith.  Each of the clans builds a bonfire in the fields around Arkadia preparing the traditional foods of their clan and offering enough to share.  

Skaikru’s contribution is the moonshine still.

Jasper and Monty – who have sarcastically named the festivities “Unity Day 2.0” – join forces with Nyko and some friends of Luna’s to manufacture a truly dizzying array of libations, and the bar has a crowd gathered in front of it all night long.  Alcohol does what the Grounder Alliance could not: make the members of the thirteen clans feel, bit by bit, a few clusters at a time, like one people.

Abby and Clarke make the rounds with Roan and Luna to greet the ambassadors.  Roan’s peculiar and inexplicable bond with Clarke is multiplied tenfold in the respect – bordering on awe – he holds for Abby.  Even in Azgeda they heard the stories of _Heda Abi kom Skaikru, nomon gon Wanheda,_ the woman who could turn Reapers back into men.   She impressed him favorably when she attended Lexa’s summit as Chancellor, and his admiration only grows the longer he and the other Grounder leaders spend in council with Kane and Abby, mapping out a desperate last-ditch plan for their people’s survival.  Roan’s trust for Skaikru on the whole is grudging and provisional, but he’s very nearly _fond_ – in his gruff Roan way – of the Griffins.

Under ordinary circumstances, of course, this would be an unequivocal good.  At the “Unity Day v.20” gathering, however, it creates some complications.

Or, more precisely, just the _one_ complication.

 Abby doesn’t remember exactly how the drinking contest started – whether she challenged Roan or Roan challenged her – but she remembers a look of wild, unabashed delight on Jasper’s face as he called out at the top of his lungs for everyone else to gather around the firepit and watch.

“ _Skaiplana_ against _Azhefa_ ,” remarks Indra dryly.  “This should be very interesting.”

They played by Ice Nation rules, which meant standing on your feet.  No sitting, leaning, or other source of support.  The first to lose their balance is out.  “It’s not just about how much you can drink,” Roan explains sternly, about halfway through.  “It’s about how much you can drink and still hold yourself upright on a horse.”  The fact that neither of them are anywhere near a horse is irrelevant, as Abby’s intoxicated brain decides this is the wisest thing anyone has ever said to her, and she tells Roan so.  Loudly.  Twice.

By drink #3, there’s a massive crowd gathered around the fire pit.  Azgeda and Skaikru, of course, adhere strictly to their team allegiances, but loyalty among the other Grounders is roughly half-and-half, causing a flurry of wagers and boisterous cheering on both sides.  Jasper, who appoints himself Abby’s cornerman (“nobody else here knows more about alcohol than he does,” Monty explains reassuringly to a bemused Clarke), is standing on top of the stone bench of the firepit, calling out each round, and his voice isn’t exactly unobtrusive.  By drink #6, Bellamy has heard the commotion and arrived to disapprove, standing beside Jasper with his arms folded, watching Abby with a combination of genuine concern and an almost parental crossness.  Clarke, by this point, has given in altogether and stands beside Raven, wildly cheering.

Maybe it’s because Abby spent forty years on the Ark drinking alcohol distilled from substances more commonly used as industrial cleaning solvents or in large-scale manufacturing.  Maybe it’s because she’s used to Jasper’s moonshine, while the liquor of choice in Azgeda – _fayawoda_ , a heavy sweet brew similar to mead – has a lower alcohol content.  Or maybe, as a vociferous chorus of infuriated Grounders begin to shout, stomping their feet on the ground, it’s because Roan is still recovering from the near-fatal bullet wound Marcus Kane gave him and has not fully recovered.

Either way, Roan falters halfway through drink #11, and stumbles just enough that his hand reflexively shoots out to balance on the stone bench of the firepit.  It only lasts for a moment before he realizes what he’s done, and concedes graciously to the sound of Jasper and Raven’s violent shrieking cheers.  “AB-BY!  AB-BY! AB-BY!”

The warm electric heat of eleven shots of moonshine has flooded her body with a tidal wave of adrenaline.  She doesn’t feel drunk yet – no dizziness, slurring, clumsy movements.  She just feels sharpened, heightened, a bolder and more brightly-colored version of herself.

“Drink these,” says Jasper, racing over to her with a tin mug of scalding hot black coffee and another of cold water.  

“I feel fine,” she tells him exuberantly, because she does, but she obediently drinks the water anyway, hands the mug back to him, and takes the coffee.  “Let’s climb up to the roof!” she tells Jasper in a conspiratorial voice, and only the baffled furrow in his brow is any indication that this is not the kind of thing Abby Griffin usually says or does.

“You’re not climbing up to the roof,” says the stern, decisively fun-ruining voice of Bellamy from behind her, still staring her down with his arms folded.  “You’ll break your neck.”

“Only if I fall,” she explains, slowly, carefully, as though he’s very stupid.  “And I’m not _going_ to.  So it’s _fine.”_

“If you fall off the roof, Clarke will kill me.”

She waves this off.  “Clarke’s done plenty of stupid things in her life.  She’ll get over it.”

“Then _Marcus_ will kill me,” he says, and he means it to dissuade her but she suddenly realizes she hasn’t seen Marcus all night.

“I forgot about him,” she tells Bellamy, in a voice she thinks is a dramatic whisper but isn’t.

“Okay,” Bellamy sighs, taking her by the elbow and steering her towards the Ark doors, “let’s get you inside.”

“I wasn’t supposed to forget about him.”

“He’s in his office, he’s trying to finish up the supply route maps before he meets with Commander Luna in the morning.”

“We should go see him.”

“He’s working, Abby.”

“Did you know he’s in love with me?” she says, stepping lightly over the ground at Bellamy’s side, something almost like a skip in her step. He turns to look at her with an expression on his face even sober Abby wouldn’t have been able to read.

“Yes,” Bellamy says finally.  “I think I did know that.”

“He doesn’t know I know,” she says brightly.  “I think I should tell him.  Don’t you think I should tell him?”

“You’ve had eleven glasses of moonshine,” Bellamy reminds her pointedly. “I think it’s a terrible idea for you to tell Kane anything.”

“It’s a nice thing to tell people that you love them.”

“Then tell him tomorrow.  And he pulls open the metal door and guiding her gently over the steps in the doorway to keep her from tripping and falling.

“No, _now._ Tomorrow I’ll be scared again,” she insists, turning left (for Kane’s office) instead of right (towards her quarters), and taking off briskly down the hall.

“Nope,” says Bellamy firmly, seizing her by the elbows again and steering her back in the other direction.  “Abby, I need you to trust me on this.  Going to see Kane right now is an awful, awful idea.”

“But I have to say the thing.”

Bellamy rubs his temples wearily. Eleven-glasses-of-moonshine Abby is somehow eleven times more stubborn than regular Abby, and their argument in the hallway reaches a disruptive enough volume that finally he gives up, hoists Abby into his arms, and marches her - against great protest - down the hallway to her bedroom.  “I swear to God,” he mutters, dumping her unceremoniously onto her bed and stomping back towards the door, “I will pull up a chair and sit here all night unless you _promise me you will not leave this room.”_

 _“Fine,”_ Abby huffs, but contents herself with making a face at Bellamy’s back as he makes his grumbling way back down the hall.

She finishes the coffee and drinks some more water, then makes her one Bellamy-approved excursion to the bathroom down the hall, where she kicks off her boots and strips down for a bracing cold shower that snaps her back to alertness.  By the time she changes back into the cotton slip she sleeps in, pulling her hair up into a knot that’s far messier than she thinks it is, and feels the chilly night air against her damp skin, she feels better.  She’s not sober again, by a long shot, but the shower and the cool air and the coffee and the irritation at Bellamy have taken the edge off, and she feels no more than pleasantly warm.  

Abby is an adult, not to mention a doctor, and fully comprehends the difference between how drunk she _feels_ (hardly at all) and how drunk she still, technically, _is_ (eleven glasses of moonshine’s worth which won’t be metabolized out of her system until tomorrow).  But she, like all the adults raised on the Ark, has a markedly high tolerance for distilled spirits and even though she knows she _shouldn’t_ go climb the roof, she does still privately believe that she _could._

Still.

She did promise she wouldn’t leave this room, and she knows somehow Bellamy will find out if she does, so she silently, petulantly concedes to his order that she not go to the Chancellor’s office looking for Marcus.

Then, “Abby?” she hears a voice in the hallway, and she beams with all the delight of an excessively drunk woman who has just pulled one over on Bellamy Blake, because while she gave him her word that she would not go looking for Marcus, nobody said anything about Marcus coming to look for _her._

“Come in,” she says excitedly, and he gives her a curious look, but steps though the open door warily.

“I thought I heard you come in with Bellamy a little while ago,” he says in a measured voice, watching her carefully, and she suddenly realizes that someone has ratted her out.

“I’m not that drunk,” she announces, meaning it to sound reassuring, but it seems instead to throw Marcus off-kilter.

“Clarke said you beat Roan in a drinking contest after a dozen shots of moonshine,” he says, and there’s exasperation and amusement tinging his patient voice in equal measure.  Abby dismisses this with a gesture of her hand.

“ _Eleven_ isn’t a _dozen_ ,” she explains, but this doesn’t help quite as much as she expects it to for some reason.

“Why don’t I get you some water,” he says gently, “and then – “

“Come to bed,” she interrupts him, and holds out her hand. He can’t quite move, looking in confusion from the bed to her and from her to the bed.  “Marcus,” she says again.  “Come to bed with me.”

“I … okay,” he agrees hesitantly, stepping all the way inside and closing the door.  “I think you getting some sleep is probably a good idea.”

“Not to sleep,” she corrects him, and there’s nowhere left for him to hide from the thing she’s trying to say.  

“Abby,” he begins uncertainly, and her face lights up.

“It makes me feel things when you say my name,” she tells him happily.  “I like when you say it.”

“Abby, I don’t think – “

“There it is again.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for – “

“Marcus, I’m in love with you,” she announces, and he freezes, his blood running cold.  He opens his mouth to answer her but he can’t.  “I know you think I’m only saying it because I’m drunk.  But I’m not.  I mean I’m _saying_ it because I’m drunk, but I’m not saying it _because_ I’m drunk.”

“I … don’t have any idea what that means.”

“It means I love you too,” she says again, firmly, insistently, “I just didn’t say it before.  But it’s true.  I’m not imagining it.  I just wasn’t brave enough to say it back.”

“You – I – what?  What do you mean, say it _back_?”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Abby – “

“When you said what you said.  I was almost sleeping.  But I wasn’t.  I heard you.”

He stares at her, blank, confused, and swallows hard. “That was five days ago,” he says quietly.  “Abby, why didn’t you … you didn’t say anything.  Then, or … or after.  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs nonchalantly, as though such a trivial thing can’t possibly matter now.  “I can’t remember.  I think I was scared.  Wasn’t that stupid?  It was stupid.”

“Abby – “

“The world might end in six months, Marcus, why are we wasting time?”

He takes a deep breath to steady himself.  “I’m going to get you a glass of water and let you get some sleep,” he tells her, “and then tomorrow, when you’re yourself again, we can talk about – “

He doesn’t get to finish.  

It all happens so fast, too fast for his sane, pragmatic, responsible mind to get a word in edgewise.  Before he can even finish a thought, her hands are on his face and her breasts are brushing his chest and then oh God, oh Jesus, she’s kissing him.

It’s nothing like before.  It’s hungry and wild and joyful and she wants him _so badly_ and maybe a better man than he is could have resisted a little longer, but the moment her little pink tongue slides over his bottom lip and slips lightly inside his mouth to caress his own, he’s gone, it’s over, he can’t fight it, and then she’s in his arms.

She kisses him and he kisses her back and neither of them can stop or pull away except to catch their breath.  Abby’s mouth is hot and wet and willing and she tastes sweet and spicy, like Jasper’s moonshine, and his heart has never beat this hard and fast before in all his life, he thinks it might burst out of his chest.  In his wildest dreams he never imagined that he could ever want someone this much.

He had a plan, this wasn’t in the plan, he was going to be so careful.  He thought was holding this gossamer thing in his hands, this fragile concoction of spun glass, and if he moved too quickly it would shatter.  He was going to go slow, he was going to wait, he was going to take his time to be sure, not just out of consideration for what Abby might want or need or be ready for but because – if he’s truly honest with himself – he’s terrified. 

Inch by inch, that’s all he’s brave enough for.  

He remembers the way it felt the first time his mouth touched hers, heady from the adrenaline of narrowly escaping his own death, still simmering in the regret he’d felt wash over him the moment the guards took him away … regret for all the things he’d never get to say to her because he was about to die.  And so the moment he’d seen in her eyes that she wasn’t coming with them, the moment he realized he had a second chance at a goodbye and could do it right this time, the prudent Marcus Kane who always took stock and weighed the risks flew out the window and he couldn’t have stopped himself if he wanted to.

That kiss had stayed on his lips every moment of every day and had haunted him as he lay on the cold ground every night from the minute he pulled away from her until the minute Jaha reached up to the cross where he hung and put the chip on his tongue.  Even when she kissed him again, in Polis, the other kiss was with him, whispering in his ear, _It didn’t feel like this before.  She wasn’t like this before.  Something is wrong._  But he didn’t _want_ it to be, he didn’t want to believe it, he didn’t want to live in a world where a heartless artificial intelligence could mimic the woman he loved so precisely that he would have given away everything he knew about Clarke’s plan and was saved only by the simple fact of not knowing anything to give away.  

Because she’d _run_ to him, she’d let him hold her, she’d been frightened and asked him for comfort, and he didn’t know until he wrapped her in his arms how badly he’d longed to feel that.  That she would want him, need him, ask to be held by him.  He didn’t know until her mouth crashed into his, hungry and frantic but curiously cold – not generous, but _demanding_ in a way that Abby Griffin would never be – that the yearning of his body to submit, to let her take him right here, right now, in the Commander’s bedroom, was finally drowned out by the other kiss, the _real_ kiss, calling out to him that someone else was kissing him with Abby Griffin’s mouth and it was fatal not to stop this.

But it’s not like that now.

She’s definitely drunk, and this is definitely probably a bad idea, but he realizes right away that she’s not anywhere near as out of control as Clarke and the others made it sound.  She’s not slurring her words, she’s steady on her feet, and as she backs him up against the wall she deftly navigates a small table and the travel pack on the floor which are in her way.  She could still, most likely, sit upright on a horse, which means by Azgeda standards she still qualifies as sober – though of course Marcus has no way of knowing this.  

But she’s definitely _different._  She’s looser, less afraid, drunk enough to ask him for exactly what she wants in a way that she’d be afraid to sober.  He knows it can’t go further than kissing – not now, not tonight. And perhaps a better man than Marcus Kane would call a halt to even the kissing, too.

Marcus Kane would like to be a good man.  He’s fought hard over the past months to become one, to be the man that Abby Griffin thinks he has the potential to be.  The man she believes in.  

He wants to be the kind of man who is strong enough to pull away from her, gently but firmly, tuck her into bed, pour her a glass of water, and close the door behind him.

All of that flies out the window the moment her lips brush his throat.

There’s a hollow of tendon and bone at the joining of his neck and his shoulder, and Abby’s mouth finds it like a homing beacon.  Marcus has never been kissed here before.  He has never given this particular square inch of his body a moment’s thought.  But Abby’s lips open and close against his sun-bronzed skin, warming him with her moonshine breath, and suddenly it’s as though every nerve ending is rewired to that little hollow, sending electric shocks through his whole body.

The sound he makes is so raw, so naked, so needy, that under any other circumstances he would be mortified.  But Abby hums a happy little sigh back to him and presses her mouth against his skin even harder, even flicking at it lightly with an upwards curl of her tongue, as though beckoning to him, and it’s that simple moment – that stimulus and response – that undoes him completely.  

That Abby would receive pleasure by giving him pleasure – that his unguarded expression of want would spur her on, would _arouse_ her – startles him down to the very marrow of his bones and it’s only then that he realizes she was telling him nothing but simple truth.

_Abby is in love with him._

He pulls away, sudden and sharp, his hands sliding down from her hair to grip her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

She tilts her head, puzzled.  “What?”

“Say it again,” he tells her, and she smiles.

“Every day, if you want me to,” she concedes agreeably. “For the rest of our lives.  But you say it too.”

“I’ll say it,” he promises.  

“I love you, Marcus,” she says, pure happiness beaming out of her eyes, and he feels his jaw clench with the pressure of holding back tears.

“I love you, Abby,” he says back to her.  “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

She rests her hands on his chest, her mouth hot and insistent once again at that spot on his throat she’s somehow pinpointed as shockingly, agonizingly sensitive, and he makes the sound again.  She chuckles a little, kissing her way up to nibble, just a little, at his earlobe.

“Come to bed with me,” she whispers, pleading, yearning, and God help him, he’s never wanted anything more in his life.  “Please, Marcus.  I want you to.”

“You’ve had a lot to drink,” he says, which is a stall tactic and not an answer, and she knows it.  She pulls away, just a little, so she can look up at him, pouting a tiny bit, biting her lip.  She’s not quite acting like herself but the real kiss whispering inside his mind is laughing because this isn’t ALIE, just moonshine and libido.  There’s nothing here to worry about except the crippling headache she’ll have in the morning.  

“Please, Marcus,” she begs him again, voice high and sharp with need, but he shakes his head.

“We will,” he says to her firmly, cupping her face in his hands.  “Not tonight. But we will.”

“Why not?” she complains, face tight with hungry disappointment, and he answers with a kiss so hard and hot and sudden that all the breath is startled out of her lungs.

“Because when it happens,” he murmurs as he pulls away, “I want you to remember it.  I want you to remember everything.  I want to know that it’s what you want.”

“It’s what I want _now.”_

“It might feel different in the morning.”

“It hasn’t for the last two months,” she retorts.  “This isn’t just tonight, Marcus.  This is how it _always_ feels.”

“Abby – “

“I’m in _love_ with you,” she says again stubbornly.  “It’s not just that I worry about you when you go off to do dangerous things or get scared when you’re hurt or that I want to be near you all the time. It’s not just the way that you love Clarke and the way you take care of Octavia and Bellamy and the way you’re always ready to give up anything to take care of our people.  It’s all those things, Marcus, and a thousand more things, but it’s also the fact that every night when you get into my bed I very, very, very badly want to climb on top of you and tear off all your clothes.”

She says it so matter-of-factly, so much like sober, straightforward, no-nonsense Abby, that even though her words send a shiver down his spine he also wants to laugh.  It’s such an Abby Griffin seduction tactic – a frank and straightforward avowal of desire accompanied by an implicit challenge: _Now, what are you going to do about it?_

He kisses her again, then pulls away – with infinite reluctance – to leave the room.  “Go to sleep,” he tells her again.  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You’re not even going to stay to sleep?” she pouts, and he chuckles.  His amusement clearly annoys her, which only delights him more.

“I’m going back to my quarters and I’m locking the door,” he tells her wryly.  “You’re in a very dangerous mood.”

“Your door doesn’t have a lock.”

“I’ll drag the couch in front of it.”

“Marcus.”

“You threatened to climb on top of me and rip off all my clothes.”

_“Marcus.”_

“Go to bed, Abby,” he tells her, as he steps out into the hallway.  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

* * *

Neither of them sleep well.  Agonized arousal, too much silence, and (on Abby’s part) excessive moonshine combine to give both of them a restless night.  Abby misses the feeling of his arms around her.  Marcus misses the warm weight of her body against his chest.  

But there’s something else inside the restlessness too, a shadowy future promise of something taking shape between them that makes heat swell through both their bodies as they stare up at the ceiling.  

 _Not tonight,_ he had said.   _But we will._

They fall asleep thinking of each other.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "teaching the other something new" (NSFW)

Marcus wakes up at his regular hour, shortly after dawn.  He slept badly, the bed which has served him perfectly well for months now abruptly too big and too empty without Abby in it.

He wonders if she’ll remember saying any of the things she said, and can’t decide if he wants the answer to be yes or no.

Funny, he thinks a little ruefully, that two people who have stared down death and danger so many times are so entirely unable to be brave about this.  Marcus could only say it believing Abby was sleeping and couldn’t hear him.  Abby could only say it after eleven glasses of moonshine and a shouting match with Bellamy.

On the whole, he decides after careful consideration, thinking it over while he washes and dresses and eats his breakfast, he’d rather she forget.  She wasn’t in control of herself.  He worries that even if she meant it, she hadn’t meant to _say_ it.

It feels, a little, like he knows something he wasn’t meant to know.

And this is the thing, when all’s said and done, that ties his stomach in knots and sent him back to his own cold bed last night.  It isn’t that he doubts her (Abby Griffin doesn’t say she loves you if she doesn’t mean it) and it certainly isn’t because he didn’t want to take her to bed.

It’s something selfish and small and he isn’t proud of it, but the answer is simply that he’s afraid.

Afraid of what would happen to his heart if he took her to bed, woke up beside her the next morning, leaned down with a smile to kiss her, and then watched the sudden mortifying realization that she’d said something she hadn’t meant to say cast a shadow over her face.

No woman has ever held Marcus Kane in her hands like this before.  He’s entirely vulnerable and he knows it.  And the most terrifying thing he can imagine in all the world is Abby Griffin’s brown eyes looking at him with anything like regret.

So he finishes his coffee, stops by Medical to have Jackson reschedule all of Abby’s appointments until the afternoon so she can sleep, and heads outside across the camp to the field of Grounder tents to do one of the few out-and-out cowardly things he’s ever done in all his life.

* * *

It’s poor Bryan who accidentally steps in it and ends up breaking the news to Abby.

She wakes up around two in the afternoon with a brutal headache and staggers unhappily to the mess hall for as much black coffee as Emori will give her.  (Murphy’s resourceful Grounder girlfriend has made herself indispensable all over camp; she spends most of her time working in Engineering with Monty and Raven, where her knowledge of ALIE’s tech has been invaluable, but she’s also taken with a surprising relish to the role of bartender.  Her humor is drier and sharper than Gina’s, but it’s a breath of fresh air to have someone running the counter again.  It heals something small but real inside all of them.) 

Bryan is in line ahead of her, filling his own dented tin canteen for his shift in the guard tower.  “Did you get your radio?” he asks her suddenly, and Abby’s head is so fogged that the words mean nothing.  She has to ask him to repeat himself three times.  “The long-range radio,” he explains patiently, carefully modulating his voice (he was there at the campfire last night too and can pretty well imagine how her head must be feeling).

“What radio?”

“They took both the single-channel long-ranges with them,” he says, speaking slowly.  Abby stares with blank, confused eyes.  Bryan gently removes the cup of hot coffee from her hands and sets it down before she drops it.  “Bellamy has the main, and left the receiver in the council chamber for daily reports.  But I made Nate take one of the single-channels too.  Just because they’re going to be gone so long.  So he has one end and I have the other.  And he thought Chancellor Kane might – you know – “

He’s suddenly profoundly uncomfortable and Abby isn’t any less baffled.  “Bryan, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.  “Nate and Bellamy are where?  Chancellor Kane might what?”

“Nate didn’t want to, you know, overstep,” Bryan explains hastily.  “But with them gone for such a long time he thought maybe you guys might want a way to talk to each other.  Not over the main, where everyone can hear you, but just.  You know.  Like.  To have a conversation.”

“ _Nate_ wants to have a private conversation with me?”

“Oh, for the love of God,” snaps an exasperated Murphy, approaching from behind the counter with a small long-range radio receiver in his hand.  “Here.  Kane took a team up in the Rovers with Luna and Roan to survey the relocation site.  Miller dropped this off in Medical before they left in case you and the Chancellor need to have Private Grownup Time without the whole council chamber listening in on the main channel.  Are we good?  Everyone up to speed?  Because you have four patients waiting so you better knock back that coffee so you can, you know, turn back into Abby again.”  Then he thrusts the radio into her hands and stomps off irritably down the hall.

Abby doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Don’t forget your coffee,” says Bryan awkwardly, holding out the dented tin cup.  She doesn’t take it.

“He’s gone?” she asks him in a small voice.

“Two weeks, three at the most,” Bryan says, trying to be reassuring, and isn’t sure why Abby receives that news like a punch in the stomach.  Finally, unsure what to do, he sets the coffee cup down on the counter, gives Abby’s shoulder an awkward pat for reasons even he doesn’t quite understand, and then bolts – leaving Abby alone with a cup of coffee that’s getting cold and the knowledge that Kane drove off for Azgeda for two weeks without even telling her goodbye.

* * *

She’s alone in her quarters, undressing for bed, when the radio beeps.

“Abby?”

Even through the faint crackle of a long-distance radio, she can hear the hesitation in his voice.  Not wondering if she’s there, but wondering if she’ll answer.

“It’s just me,” he says.  “Nate Miller gave me this and told me he left the other receiver with you.  It’s a single-channel, so no one can hear us.  Unless you’re in Medical.  Oh God, please tell me you didn’t leave this in Medical and I’m talking to Jackson right now.”

Against her will, she catches herself in a laugh, and switches on the radio receiver.  “No Jackson,” she says, and hears Marcus let out a sigh of desperate relief.  “Just me.”

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she says back.  “What the hell are you doing in Azgeda?”

“Surv – “

“And don’t say ‘surveying the relocation site,’” she interrupts him.  “I mean what are you _actually_ doing there.”

“That _is_ what I’m actually doing here.  I promise.”

She sighs, carrying the radio over to the bed, climbing in, and switching off the lamp.  She sets the radio on Kane’s pillow and hates herself for how much better it instantly makes her feel.  “Okay,” she sighs, “let me try a different question.  Why did you suddenly develop a burning desire to run off and survey the relocation site on this of all mornings, without telling me you were going?”

“I thought you might not … want to see me.  At least, for a little while.”

“Marcus, did you think I was going to take it all back?” she asks him incredulously, and the uncomfortable silence on the other end is answer enough.  “You’re an idiot,” she sighs again.  “If you had just _asked_ me – “

“I thought,” he begins hesitantly.  “I thought you might … after last night, that you might – need some space.”

“I don’t need space,” she says firmly.  “I need you back here in my bed, instead of in Azgeda with Roan, being an idiot.”  He has no response to this.  “I get why you didn’t want to stay last night,” she goes on, “but surely even _your_ over-developed sense of propriety can’t _possibly_ draw the line at sleeping with a sane and sober and willing woman who is head-over-heels in love with you, just because she got drunk _yesterday.”_

The silence at the end is so heavy that for one awful moment she’s afraid something disastrous has happened, that he’s gone quiet because someone else is there or that her bluntness has finally crossed an irretrievable line.

“Marcus?”

“No, I’m here.  I’m still here.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.  The others are sleeping near the Rovers, I just came off first watch.  My tent’s about a hundred feet away.  You?”

“I’m in bed.”  There’s a long pause.  “You’re very quiet, still.”

“I’m just  …  Did you say what I think you said?”

“That I’m in bed?”

“No, before.”

“I don’t understand how you could possibly be so flummoxed by me telling you I want to sleep with you, Marcus,” she says, exasperated.  “I was drunk last night, but I wasn’t _hallucinating.”_

“I didn’t think about that,” he finally responds, his voice conveying that maybe, just maybe, he’s made a terrible mistake.  “I didn’t want you to be uncomfortable, seeing me, in case you regretted anything about last night.  I didn’t think about – about – “

“About the fact that I could be in bed right now with you instead of this radio if you’d knocked on my door this morning and just _asked_ me.”

“Well … yes.”

“And now you’re in Azgeda for two weeks.”

“This was … maybe not my best plan,” he concedes, and Abby bursts out laughing.  After awhile, he begins to chuckle too.

“I love you for wanting to be sensitive to my feelings,” she tells him, “but I hate you for being all the way up there in a stupid tent while I’m alone in this bed.”

“Well, if it helps,” he says glumly, “now I hate myself for that too.”

“Of course, there’s always – “ Abby begins, then halts abruptly, flushing red with mortification once she realizes what she’s said.

“There’s always what?”

“Nothing.”

“Abby?”

“It’s nothing.  It’s just – no, never mind, you won’t like it.”

“Abby.”

“It’s just … it’s this thing Jake and I used to do,” she explains, “when he was stationed overnight doing repairs, or our shifts were out of whack and I knew I’d go days without seeing him.  We’d each take a radio and find a private spot, and we would – “

“You would what?”

“Well …” Her voice trails off, almost sheepishly.

“Over the _radio_?”  Kane is shocked.

“Well, when one of you works nights and you have a toddler, you make do where you can,” she retorts.  “Haven’t you ever – “

“Only alone, in the privacy of my own bed, like a normal person,” he insists.  “Not with somebody else.  Over the _radio.”_

“It was a _private channel,_ good Lord, you’re acting like we broadcast our sex life over the Ark-wide frequency so they could hear us on Farm Station.”

“What would you even – how would you – what would you _say?”_

“We kept it simple,” she shrugs.  “Mostly just, describing what you’re doing to yourself, how it feels, letting yourself make whatever sounds – “

“And that’s not embarrassing?”

“Not if you’re doing it right.”

“Or I could just cancel this trip and come home,” he suggests.  “Can you just sit tight for six hours?”

She laughs.  “We do actually need a detailed ground survey,” she points out.  “Sooner rather than later.”

“I know.”

“And it will probably take you two or three weeks to do it right.”

“I know.”

“So it’s my way or nothing.”

“I think that’s your favorite sentence,” he informs her, and she bursts out laughing.

“I love you,” she says.  “I’ll keep saying it until it gets through your idiot skull.  Now take off your clothes.”

“We need to work on the whole romance thing with you, a bit.”

“I mean it,” she insists.  “We’re doing this.”

“If we’re just,” he begins awkwardly, but isn’t sure how to finish.  “I mean, I don’t need to – I could do it with – “

“It’s not about efficiency,” she explains.  “It’s about creating a mood.  A feeling.”  She sits up in bed and slowly pulls off her cotton slip.  “Can you hear that sound?” she asks him.

“A little bit.”

“That’s me taking off my clothes,” she says, her voice lowering a little, and she can hear him swallow hard through the radio.  “Now I’m naked, in bed, under the covers.  I’m ready.  It’s your turn.”

He doesn’t say anything, but she hears the sounds of zippers, of buckles, of heavy canvas and denim.  She closes her eyes and imagines him there, in her room, his gaze hot and hungry on hers as he slowly steps out of his jeans.

“Okay,” he says, in a tentative voice.  “I did it.”

“When you touch yourself, how do you do it?” she asks.

“Oh God.  This is already mortifying.”

“You haven’t even tried it.”

“I just … I don’t know.  I do it the regular way.”

“The regular way?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he says helplessly, “I just do it the way everybody does it.”

“Okay, why don’t you start,” she says gently, soothingly, “start slow, and just tell me what you’re doing as you do it.”

“I feel ridiculous.”

“We’ve barely started.  Just try it.”

She hears him sigh, but it’s followed by the soft sounds of skin-on-skin friction.  He’s definitely stroking himself, and it’s clear that his technique is efficient but unimaginative.

“Okay,” she murmurs into the radio.  “Marcus.  Close your eyes.  I want you to breathe in and out.  Just think about your breathing, and my voice.  Don’t think about how weird this feels, just be right here with me.  Okay?”

He doesn’t answer, but she hears his breath begin to deepen and soften, and she smiles.  “Good,” she says reassuringly.  “That’s really good.  Now I want you to try something.  I want you to run your fingertips up and down along the inside of your thighs.  Don’t stroke yourself – not yet – but just touch your skin.  Light and gentle.”  She listens for a long moment to the sound of his breathing, feeling warmth begin to swirl inside her.  “Good,” she murmurs.  “Now maybe your chest.  Or your pelvic bone.  Or your hips.  Just let yourself feel skin on skin.  Imagine that it’s me.  That I’m there.  That I’m touching you.  Very gentle.  Just to relax you a little bit.”  A soft sigh escapes him, telling her that it’s working.  “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.  Warm,” he says, and he’s hesitant but doesn’t sound embarrassed anymore, just a little shy.

“That’s good,” she says encouragingly.  “Warm is good.  Now I’m going to teach you some other ways to touch yourself and I want you to tell me what you like.  First, just try running your fingertips over the head.  Just very gently.  Do you ever do that?”

“No.”

“Try it,” she murmurs, and is rewarded with a long, shaky exhalation and a faint quaver in his breathing.  “There are a large number of nerve endings concentrated just beneath the coronal ridge,” she says, and it comes out ever so faintly prim.  Marcus gives a low chuckle.

“Are we in bed together,” he asks, “or is this Sex Education with Doctor Griffin?”

“I can tell through the radio you have the technique of a teenager,” she retorts.  “Trust me.  You want Doctor Griffin.”

He chuckles again, and there’s something throaty and vibrant inside it and she realizes with a start that this is turning him on.  “Okay, then, Doctor Griffin,” he murmurs agreeably.  “What are your orders?”

“Run your fingertip in a circle just underneath the head,” she instructs him.  “With light but firm pressure against the coronal ridge.”  He hisses a sharp intake of breath, and she smiles with satisfaction.  “Good,” she says.  “Keep doing that.”

“What are you doing?”

“What?”

“I mean, am I all alone over here, or is Doctor Abby only a spectator and not a participant?  Tell me what you like.”

She leans back against the pillows and gamely closes her eyes.  “I’m stroking my breasts, first,” she tells him, fingertips shivery-light against the soft white flesh.  She pinches her nipples until her areolas pebble beneath her fingertips, and then in a voice barely above a whisper, she carefully describes the sensation to a highly intrigued Marcus.

“Is it like goosebumps?” he wants to know, and she laughs.

“A bit. More intense, though.”

“And it feels good?”

“It feels really good.”

“Are you,” he begins hesitantly, “are you thinking about  … what are you thinking about?”

She can tell what he wants to ask, but he’s afraid to, so she answers it for him.

“I’m thinking about your mouth on my breasts,” she answers him truthfully, and she can hear his breath through the radio begin to come fast and shallow.  “My nipple in between your teeth.  Your lips all over my skin.”

“Abby,” he exhales in a dazed, aroused whisper, and she feels with triumph that they’ve crossed over to the other side, that desire has swallowed up embarrassment and he’s right here with her.

“Marcus, run your fingertip very lightly up the vein of your cock,” she instructs him in a soft, breathy voice.  “Do you feel that little indentation, where the vein meets the ridge?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever touched yourself there?”

“No.”

“That’s the frenulum,” she explains, in the formal Doctor Abby voice that appears to be overwhelming him with arousal every time she uses it.  “It’s a tight little bundle of nerve endings.  Flick at it, very lightly.”

The desperate, animal groan that tumbles out of him through the radio sends shivers all over her body, and she curses the distance between them that prevents her from watching.  “Does that feel good?”

“Oh God,” he moans, “I’ve never … it’s never  …”

“Do it again,” she instructs him.  “Very lightly.  Keep doing it.  Imagine that I’m there with you, Marcus, imagine it’s my hand.  My tongue.  Let me be there with you.”

“Oh God, Abby,” he whimpers, breath coming rough and fast, and she can just faintly hear the soft tap of skin on skin as he flicks his fingertip against this desperately sensitive spot he’s discovered for the first time at the age of forty-two.

“Keep doing that,” she whispers, “and I’m going to join you.”

“What are you going to do?” he asks breathlessly.  “How do you like it?”

“I like it a lot of different ways.”

“Educate me, Doctor Griffin.”

She smiles, sliding a hand down between her thighs.  “The thick outer folds are called the _labia majora_ ,” she says, “and they can take a little more pressure.  You can suck on them, or take them very lightly between your teeth, or massage them between your fingers.  And then inside is the _labia minora_ , which is very delicate and wants to be treated gently.”

“What do you want me to do to it?” he whispers, and she shivers.

“Run your tongue very lightly along the folds,” she tells him, and is met with a heavy groan.

“I’m so close,” he murmurs, “I think I’m about to – “

“Go easy, then,” she orders him.  “Go back to the slow strokes up the shaft you were doing before.  Slow and gentle.  Don’t make yourself come yet.  Just let yourself feel.”

Her fingertips slide wetly through the folds of her cunt as she listens to his long, ragged, drawn-out sighs and the friction of skin on skin.

“What would you want me to do next?” he murmurs, and she answers him with a breathy little cry of pleasure as her fingertips find the hard little bud at her center.

“This is how I like it,” she pants.  “This is what I want.  I want your mouth on my clit.”

“Are you touching yourself there right now? Does it feel good?”

“It feels so good,” she gasps, fingers working harder and faster.  

“I like listening to you,” he whispers.  “Let me just listen to you.  Let me hear you come.”

“Okay,” she breathes huskily, and settles back against the pillows, parting her legs wide and running her fingertips in firm, tight little circles until her clit is pulsing with heat.  She lets herself go as much as she can, though she can’t be as loud as she wants to. But she doesn’t hold back her soft, fluttering, high-pitched cries, and she can hear Marcus breathing and knows he’s as stimulated by her sounds as she is by his.  “Touch yourself at that spot I showed you again,” she manages to gasp into the radio as she feels the wave of a massive orgasm slowly begin to build deep inside her.  “Keep going until you’re right at the brink, and then stop.”  And she slows her own fingertips down to the faintest of delicate touches, feeling the rising and falling tidal wave inside her body, as she waits for him to meet her there at the peak.

“I’m, I’m,” he stammers, “I can’t – it’s almost – “

“Come with me,” she whispers.  “Come together with me.”  

The air on both sides of the radio is full of sharp breathy gasps and low moans and the murmuring of each other’s names.  Abby tumbles over the edge first, her climax bursting like fireworks inside her belly as wetness floods her thighs.  She slows down, catching her breath, and listens feverishly to the sound of Marcus rising up to his own explosive orgasm right behind her.

“Oh God,” he groans in something that sounds, heartbreakingly, like _astonishment_ – like it’s never felt like this before in all his life – and then with a rumbling cascade of low animal cries that send trembling shudders of pleasure down her spine, he comes and comes and comes, moaning and gasping and saying her name over and over and over again until the words are swallowed up completely by breath.

“Abby,” he whispers, after a long silence, and his voice is shaky, unsteady.  “Oh, God.  Abby.  That was … that was … “

He’s overwhelmed, and as profoundly endearing as she finds him in this moment, if she thinks about it too long – the grateful surprise of pleasure, of being desired – she thinks she might burst into tears.  So she forces a lighter tone than she’s really feeling and goes back to flirting.

“You think that was fun,” she teases him, “just wait until I’m actually there.”

“Get here fast,” he commands her, and she laughs.

“Marcus, I can’t drive the Rover.”

“I’ll find someone to drive you.”

“And say what? Someone has to drop what they’re doing and go to Azgeda for two weeks so they can drive Abby up to have sex with Marcus because they’ve both suddenly turned into horny teenagers?”

“I’ll think of something better,” he promises, and she laughs.  “I didn’t know it could feel like this,” he suddenly says in a hesitant, soft voice, and she feels her heart turn over in her chest.  “I didn’t know I could want someone this much.”

“I know,” she agrees quietly.  “I didn’t think I’d ever have this again.  I thought … I thought that part of my life was over.”

“I’m sorry I left,” he says sadly.  “I wish I was there right now.  I wish I could hold you.”

“I put the radio on your pillow,” she confesses.  “So I can hear you breathing.”

“I’ll keep mine on too,” he promises.  “So I can feel you here.  But you should get some sleep.  You have an early morning shift tomorrow.”

“I love you, Marcus,” she says, and closes her eyes, listening to his soft breath through the fuzzy speaker of the radio, and tries to feel his arms around her as she drifts off to sleep.

“I love you too,” he says, and then – very softly – “thank you.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "sharing a bath/swim" (NSFW)

Twelve days pass. 

The surveying team is camped in tents, spending every daylight hour meticulously mapping the topography and water tables of a hundred square miles of rocky land, wrestling with infinite decisions.  Can the land grow enough food to support all the Grounders and Sky People? How will they erect enough weather-proof structures in time?  Can Luna convince the coalition to leave their homes and permanently relocate to the heart of Azgeda? 

It’s hard, uphill work.  They’re exhausted and overworked and sleeping badly.

All except Marcus Kane.

Twelve days of land surveying are succeeded by twelve nights in his tent, whispering with Abby, listening to her soft little sighs and stroking himself to dizzying climax after climax and then sinking into a deep, blissful sleep.  His bed is still too cold without her, and he impatiently counts the days until they can return to Arkadia – five more, by Roan and Bellamy’s estimates – but her voice has unlocked something inside him he never knew existed.

It isn’t just that he loves her, that he wants to protect her, hold her close, be near her.  It isn’t just her quick mind, stubborn optimism, and the unfathomable vastness of her heart. 

It’s that all his life, Marcus Kane secretly believed he was defective because he didn’t feel things the way he thought he was supposed to feel them.  Sex was perfectly fine, often even pleasant, but he could always more or less take it or leave it.  He’d never felt anything potent enough to make sense of how very important it seemed to be to other people - as though somewhere he had a piece missing.

But Abby, who he loves like the other half of his own soul, has awakened a new  thing inside him and it’s not just his heart now.  It’s his body too.  He had no idea his body could do this.  Could _feel_ like this.

He isn’t broken.  He was simply waiting for Abby.

There is no possible way to thank Nathan Miller profusely enough for the radio which would not immediately lead to excruciatingly uncomfortable follow-up questions.  So he says nothing.  

But the change is visible anyway.

“You’re in a weirdly good mood,” Bellamy remarks from beside him in the passenger seat of the Rover, startling Marcus out of his reverie, and he realizes he’s been whistling.  “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“Let’s call it hope,” is all Marcus says, smiling to himself like it’s a private joke, and Bellamy can see that’s all he’s going to get out of him about it.

The road to Azcapa – Ice Nation’s capitol city – is green and winding.  It’s about half a day’s drive from the relocation site, and it’s where they’ll be spending the next five days as the Ice Nation’s chieftains, the Skaikru council representatives, and the Grounder ambassadors begin to map out their finalized plan for resettlement.  Raven has brought Monty and Emori up with her in the Rover, along with Clarke, to help Kane advocate more effectively for the one element of his plan which he’s been absolutely unable to get Luna to budge on: namely, whether the new settlement should be powered by electricity.  Roan is willing to consider it, but Luna’s “no” was unflinching, which means Clarke – as Grounder ambassador – and Skaikru’s engineering team are suddenly urgently needed.  Raven’s prototype solar-panel shelters could power the resettlement village for generations while also protecting inhabitants from the ravages of radiation, but it’s all moot if Luna won’t budge.

Roan, who left the day before to prepare for their visit, greets Kane and Bellamy at the front gates of the crumbling, castle-like stone building that Azgeda’s upper crust calls home.  Bellamy will be camping on the surrounding grounds with the rest of the Sky People and Grounders, but Kane, as Chancellor, and Clarke as Ambassador, will be housed in private guest quarters with the other dignitaries.  (Kane is relieved to learn that they will not be forced, as several of the other Grounder leaders are, to actually share a room.)  

“Your people from Arkadia have already arrived,” Roan tells him as he leads Kane to his quarters.  There will be a formal state dinner after dark, but there are still two or three hours to kill in the meantime, and Roan recommends – if Marcus does not have any pressing demands on his time – that he might be interested in a visit to Azcapa’s greatest treasure: the natural hot springs.

 Located in a subterranean grotto beneath the foundation of the castle, _Tristraka Woda_ (“lightning water”) is Azgeda’s most sacred site.  Treaties are forged here, weapons are banned here, and every visiting Grounder dignitary making their first-ever trip to Ice Nation territory is wild with curiosity to see it for themselves.  The geothermal water bubbles up from deep inside the earth and emerges a strange, opaque white-blue shade, steaming hot and sharp with the scent of minerals.  Most of the Skaikru contingent went straight there on arrival, Roan tells him, and a few may be there still.  The Grounder ambassadors have just arrived and will no doubt make it their first stop as well.

Marcus, recognizing an opportunity when he sees it, makes his way down the winding stone staircase and through the long, dank, dungeon-like underground hallway as quickly as he can. His muscles ache, he hasn’t bathed properly in weeks, and if he’s lucky, maybe he will be able to catch a few minutes alone to relax before two dozen Grounder dignitaries join him.

Halfway down the long stone hall, he comes to a small circular chamber with shelves for clothing and troughs of warm clear water for the ritual cleansing.  He sees a pair of boots and a pile of clothes neatly stacked in one corner – it seems there’s someone in the pool already – but it’s too dark to say who they belong to. He bathes quickly, stripping the grime and sweat and road dust from his hair and body (it’s a grave sign of disrespect to enter _Tristraka Woda_ unclean) and, following Azgeda tradition, emerges into the grotto naked.

He hears the pool before he can see it, the bubbling sound a low rumble, almost a roar.  As he steps out of the stone hallway, his eyes adjust to the wavering light. The minerals found in the hot springs make the torches on the wall braziers burn a flickering white and blue.  It feels like being underwater.  The cave is hewn from gleaming, ebony-black rock, and he follows the narrow path gingerly through the cloud of thick white steam to where he can dimly make out the pool ahead of him, the silhouette of its lone inhabitant slowly emerging from the fog as he descends the rough-hewn rock steps into the scalding-hot water.

When the steam clears, he feels his heart stop beating.

It’s Abby.

Their eyes meet across the pulsing water, and for a long time, they just stare at each other.

“Marcus,” she whispers happily, and she holds out her hands to him but he can’t move.

“How are you here?” he murmurs, hardly daring to believe it, and she smiles.

“I came up with Clarke and Raven in the Rover.  I told Jackson it was to do a botanical inventory at the relocation site.  But I just …”  She stops, looks down, blushing a little.  “I couldn’t wait any longer to see you,” she says quietly, almost shyly, and he swallows hard, realizing what she really means.

What she really wants.

He steps through the chest-deep water, feeling it soak into his tired muscles and drain the exhaustion away, until he’s close enough to her that they exist in a tiny bubble surrounded by clouds and clouds of steam.  “We don’t have long,” he explains, “the entire Grounder coalition will be here any minute -”

“I don’t care,” she interrupts him.  “Kiss me.”

So he does.

The steam blankets them both in its cottony warmth as the water – which rises to Abby’s breasts – bubbles and hisses all around them. Abby has been here for nearly an hour, and her skin is pink and smooth and sheened in sweat.  When he kisses her, she tastes like something clean and pure, the way a diamond or a moonbeam might taste.  

It’s their first real kiss, in a way.  The first without the influence of moonshine or ALIE or fear.  It’s just them, savoring each other, tasting each other, lips and tongues tangled in a slow dance of desire as their bodies shift closer and closer.  Marcus knows that this is a terrible idea, that any minute now twenty people could pour out of the hallway and into the pool and the longer they let this go, the harder it will be to pull away when they finally have to.

But she’s _here._  It’s not just her soft voice through the rasp and static of the radio. It’s her warm skin and her smiling eyes and plush silken lips tugging at his own.  It’s her arms wrapping tight around him, holding him close, as her body melts against his.  They’ve never been naked together before, and he was prepared to be shy with her the first time, but Abby isn’t shy at all, which makes it easy.  She clutches at his back and presses hot little kisses up and down his throat as though they’ve been doing this all their lives, and his whole body is hot and pulsing with arousal before he can collect himself enough to pull away.

When they finally break their kisses, gasping for breath, he steps back just enough to look at her – really look.  He cradles her face in his cupped hands, feeling warm droplets of water cascade down his fingers.  She’s knotted her hair high up off her neck, but a few strands have fallen loose, curled into wet wispy tendrils by the steam, and he’s knocked off-balance by how beautiful she is.  “I’ve missed you,” he whispers, his thumbs brushing against her cheekbones as he rests his forehead against hers.  “God, I’ve missed you.  How is it possible to miss a person this much and not die from it?”

“Don’t ever leave me for that long again.”

“Never,” he promises her.  “I swear.”

She sighs in contentment at this, and clutches his hips in her hand to pull him close.  The mineral-laden water makes them both weightless, buoyant, and he feels himself begin to swell and harden.  “That bed’s no good anymore without you in it,” she murmurs, lips nibbling their way up his neck to his earlobe.  

“At least you had a bed,” he reminds her.  “I’ve been in a tent.”

“That’s completely your own fault,” she points out, the hint of a laugh in her voice.  “You’re the one that left.”

“That’s true,” he says, tilting her chin up to brush his lips against hers again.  “If I’d had any idea what you had in store for me, I would never have left that bed.”

“There’s still a lot to learn,” she murmurs, a seductive smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and he swallows hard as she pulls him close again.  He lifts his hands out of the bubbling water to rest his fingers on her collarbone, droplets trickling over the swell of her breasts as they rise up from beneath the water.  She closes her eyes and yields completely, feeling him move closer and closer until she can feel every inch of his body against hers beneath the surface.  His knees bump against hers, his hip presses into her waist, his hands slide down her shoulders to caress up and down her arms.  And then he shifts his weight, startling a gasp out of her and causing her eyes fly open to stare up at him in astonished pleasure as the silken bulk of a smooth, heavy, rapidly-stiffening cock glides smoothly into the space between her thighs.

 _“Oh,”_ she whispers, and his grip on her arms tightens.  The dense, mineral-rich water carries them afloat, and Abby can feel that sweet hard weight bob and shift with each wave of the bubbling spring, its smooth shaft bumping gently against the inside of her thighs and the aching outer folds of her cunt.  Recklessly, she steps in closer, gliding deliberately forward to taunt him with a whisper of friction, and he hisses a soft intake of breath.

“Oh God, Abby,” he breathes, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers, his hands clutching hungrily at her waist.

 _“Please,”_ she implores him and she doesn’t care that her voice is sharp with need, begging, desperate.  But he shakes his head.

“We can’t,” he murmurs hoarsely, “the others will be here any moment.”

“But they aren’t now.”

“Abby, we can’t,” he repeats, voice faltering.  “I don’t want to – our first time, I don’t – “

“We have the rest of our lives to take our time, Marcus, but if I have to wait any longer I might black out.”

Her voice is rough with impatience, and he stares down at her, his entire body crackling with desire, dizzy from his proximity to her, shaken by how beautiful she is … and entirely baffled at how it could be possible that she clearly seems to want him the same way.  How did this happen?

“I want you,” he murmurs, voice so low it’s more a breath than a whisper.  “God help me, Abby, I want you so badly.”

“I’m right here,” she breathes back, hands tightening around his neck, tangling in his wet curls, and he doesn’t resist as she lets the water buoy her up to align herself with him, wrapping one leg around his waist and resting her head against his chest as she opens herself up and moves in closer.  “Oh, please, please,” she whimpers, and Marcus begins to feel dizzy.  He knows this is a bad idea, but no human being on earth could resist this woman in this mood, pleading this desperately, and he can’t either.  Bit by bit, he begins to yield to her.  The tip of his cock nudges lightly, delicately, at the soft outer folds of her cunt before slowly, slowly, slowly positioning itself at her entrance.  “Please,” she begs him again, and so he grips her waist in hard, hungry hands and they both tremble in barely-contained desperation as the aching, pulsing head of his cock dips between her soft wet folds, nudging lightly at her clit and causing her whole body to convulse with pleasure.

“Oh God,” she sighs.  “Again.”

So he does it again, shivering at her soft muffled cry, then slides his cock lower, moving towards the throbbing, aching opening that’s crying out to take him in.  He’s huge, and thick, and as the head presses against her entrance it begins to stretch her open with agonizing pleasure.   _“Yes,”_ she groans as he takes a sharp deep breath and readies himself to press inside.

But he doesn’t get the chance.

“Kane, you in there?” Roan booms down the hallway, and within seconds the clamor of a crowd of voices echoes raucously off the stone walls.  By the time the crowd of seventeen naked Grounders spills out of the arched doorway from the bathing chamber, Abby is on one side of the pool, giving a very credible performance of someone just now waking up, and Marcus is on the other, studiously examining the source of the spring as though it’s the most fascinating sight in the world and sending silent thanks to the water’s high silica content that leaves it milk-white, nearly opaque, his achingly hard cock blissfully concealed beneath the surface of the water.  His whole body is tight and hot and throbbing with desire, but the banquet doesn’t even _begin_ for another two hours, and he desperately needs to compose himself.

Abby greets Roan and the others politely, then rises with a mermaid’s grace, water streaming off her body, to climb the steps out of the pool and disappear down the hallway.  Marcus tries to avert his eyes in the presence of witnesses, but he catches a flash of damp brown hair between her thighs that unstitches him completely.

Lost in his own thoughts, he doesn’t notice Roan waving him over until he’s said Kane’s name three times.

Four hours, at the very least, before he can find a moment alone with Abby again.

If he’s lucky.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "a night kiss" (NSFW)

The banquet lasts until midnight.

By the time they’ve finished their first dish, both Marcus and Abby are ready to hurl themselves out the window, and only the fact that the future survival of the human race depends upon full cooperation between all three peoples keeps them from leaving the table.

Their close call in the water haunts them, sending shivers down their spine at inopportune moments and leaving them both squirming in their seats, silently resenting the crowd of bodies that have spent the whole night preventing them from being alone again.

They’re _miserable._

Marcus is placed near the head of the high table with Roan, Luna and the ambassadors, while Abby sits on the other side of the room with the rest of the Skaikru guests and other lower-ranking visitors.  Marcus resents this on her behalf when they’re first seated, but after he catches her eye across the distance and feels his entire body flush with heat, he suspects seating them together could have been dangerous – if for no other reason than the fact that he’s sitting directly across from Clarke.  

It takes every ounce of concentration he possesses to remain present in the conversation.  Clarke and Luna are debating electricity again, with Roan playing neutral referee, and he’s forced to tear his eyes away from Abby more than once in order to answer a question.  But every time a new course is brought to the table, causing a lull in the conversation, his memory flies right back to the steam and the hot water and the naked Greek goddess in his arms, the way her hair curled into soft damp tendrils around her jaw and the stiff little peaks of her nipples brushed over his chest and her fingers dug into his hips as she pulled him close and the siren song of her pulsing warm wetness called out to him and her rosy lips parted to murmur “Please, please,” and –

“Because the solar cells can bank stored power for future use while at the same time absorbing excess radiation,” Clarke’s impatient voice cuts into his thoughts.  “Kane can explain it.”

Fighting back a blush and grateful for the privacy of the heavy table with its draped linen cloth, Marcus snaps out of his reverie and returns to the present.

And on and on it goes, for hours.

He finally manages to exchange a few words with her, about halfway through the banquet.  Wine and water are set out on a long trestle along the wall for guests to help themselves, to save space for the crowd of overladen platters laid out in the center of each table.  Marcus sees Abby rise from her seat to head that direction, and hastily downs his own water glass to provide an excuse to join her.

“I’m going to kill Roan,” Abby murmurs without looking up as he arrives beside her.  “How goddamn long can one dinner last?”

“Careful,” Kane says in an equally quiet voice, “don’t go casually throwing around threats of regicide in the king’s banquet hall.  Bad manners.”

“You think I’m kidding.  I’m not kidding.”

“Oh, I know you’re not.”

“I can hardly sit still,” she whispers.  “I can’t stop thinking about – “

“I know.  Neither can I.”

“How soon can we get out of here?”

“ _You_ can leave anytime,” he points out ruefully, pouring water into his glass as slowly as he plausibly can.  “I can’t leave until Roan and Luna do.”

“I’ll kill them both.”

“Easy,” he cautions he, chuckling a little.  “We’ve waited months, Abby.  We can last a few more hours.”

“But after,” she asks him, voice rising just the faintest bit with a tinge of hope and desperation.  “You promise?”

“Come hell or high water, Abigail,” he murmured as he turned to go, “it’s happening tonight.”

A shiver of anticipation hits them both at the same time as they make their way back to their seats.

* * *

But it’s easier said than done, of course.

There are thirteen courses – one representing each of the clans – and they’ve only made it up through the sixth (a light, clear fish stew in honor of Floukru) by the time they find each other at the water station.  Still six more to go.  Abby’s favorite is Ice Nation’s signature dish, a frost-covered metal bowl containing a sweet concoction of honey, spices and fresh-packed snow which is served between two of the heavier courses.  Marcus likes Trikru’s roasted game birds, served with dazzling patterns of green herbs beneath their crisp, juicy golden-brown skin.  Neither of them care for Glowing Forest Clan’s contribution, a dish of braised mushrooms that smell edible enough but have not lost their unappetizing radioactive violet hue.  

By the time the thirteenth and final dish – Skaikru’s honorary contribution, a rich coffee-and-chocolate torte made from the precious, dwindling stock of dry goods from the Mount Weather storehouse and shared as a peace offering – is served, nearly four hours have passed.  The cake is delicious, and they’ve both developed a fondness for chocolate, but neither of them can shake the thought of how much more pleasant it would be to consume in bed, with much less in the way of Grounders and daughters and clothes to get in their way.

The Skaikru contingent and the remainder of the Grounders depart to return to the campsite after the final dishes are cleared.  Abby is led away with Raven and Monty, and it’s only then that Marcus realizes the cataclysmic oversight that threatens to wreck their plans: namely, neither of them actually knows where the other is going to be sleeping. 

She’s somewhere in a tent in a field full of tents; he’s in some room in castle full of rooms.  

They have not planned this well.

Roan’s table, of course, isn’t dismissed until he leaves, and the ambassadors aren’t done talking. Pitchers of wine and bowls of nuts are brought out as the room slowly clears, leaving only the high table left, and at any other time Marcus Kane would be overjoyed at the thought of this much time to get to know the other ambassadors and make their case for resettling in _Kongedacapa_ (“Coalition City”), about which several are still dubious.  But he can’t stop thinking about Abby.

She’s going to be in his arms, tonight.

She’s going to lie naked in a bed beside him, tonight.

The things she’s taught him to do to himself over the radio, she’ll do to him with her own mouth and hands – as he to her.

And then he’ll gently lean her back against the heap of cushions and brush the loose silky strands of hair from her face as he holds himself above her and kisses her mouth and then slowly lowers his hips down to press against hers until –

“ … a separate zone with self-contained boundaries for the disposal of human waste in a hygienic manner,” the Sand Nation ambassador is saying, and Marcus sighs, dragged back to the present.

 _We have five days to talk about this_ , he grumbles silently in his mind.   _Just please let this be over soon._

* * *

He has no idea what hour it is by the time Roan escorts him back to his quarters, but it’s late.  The castle is dimly lit with torches in wall braziers, but outside it’s pitch dark.  Even with the smattering of campfire across the field, he thinks, it will be an impossible ordeal to find Abby.

Not that this stops him.

He stays in his room just long enough to give Roan time to make it to the stairwell and out of sight, before pulling the door noiselessly back open and stepping out into the hallway.  He keeps to the shadows, moving quietly through the darkness to avoid waking any of the sleeping guests housed behind the endless walls of doors, but his careful stealth is thrown out the window when, halfway to the stairs, he collides in the darkness with a small figure emerging from a recessed archway.

It isn’t until the muffled curses resolve themselves into a voice that he realizes it’s Abby.

“What are you doing here?” he hisses, startled.

“I came looking for you.”

“I was on my way to look for _you.”_

“No good,” she whispers, “I’m sharing a tent with Raven.  Please tell me you’re not roommates with Clarke.”

“No,” he murmurs, “I have my own room.”

Her eyes light up.  “Then why the hell are we still standing in this hallway?”

“Good point,” he concedes, seizing her hand, and they practically race back to his room.

He kicks the door closed as he tears frantically at his jacket, seizing her mouth in a wild, desperate kiss and feeling her clutch at him for balance as she steps out of her boots, and from then on, it’s chaos.

Hands everywhere, mouths everywhere, clothes everywhere, they finally manage to blindly stagger their way back to the bed.  Yanking back the thick fur coverlet, Abby climbs inside and holds out her hands, tugging at his own so frantically that his body crashes down on top of hers.

No preliminaries are necessary, or desired.  He was hard as iron the moment he closed the door, and she’s absolutely _soaked_.  She opens her thighs and clutches wildly at his shoulders and arches her back and in one long smooth motion he slides deep, deep, deep inside her, and they both let out a long, hoarse, moan that’s also a sigh of unbearable relief. 

“Oh, thank God,” Abby whispers, as he collapses against her breast, hips rising and falling as she urges him on with the press of her thighs.  “You’re here.  You’re finally here.”

He can’t speak, can hardly breathe.  Her warm wetness holds him tightly in place, pulsing against him, and he feels shivering wave after wave of pleasure hum and sizzle through his body.  A heavy climax begins to swell up inside him within moments, building from the base of his spine and rising through his whole body.

“I don’t know how long I can,” he begins, but she shakes her head impatiently.

“We have all night to go slow,” she chides him through gasping breaths.  “Please, just … I just need to – “

He nods, understanding.  There’s no time for niceties, no time for leisure.  They just need to come, hard and fast and together and _right now_ , their bodies sizzling with desperate need.  His mouth finds her throat and doesn’t let go, devouring her with hot hungry kisses so fervent that the scratch of his beard leaves a blossom of rose on her soft skin, making her shiver with pleasure.

“Abby,” he gasps, “I’m – “

“Take me with you,” she begs him, tugging his hand down between their bodies to find the pulsing, tender bud of her clit, which is both everything and nothing like he imagined and like nothing he’s ever felt before. She rests her hand on his own, guiding him, but he remembers on his own how she said she likes it – tight little circles with the soft tip of his finger, pressing down hard.  She nods wildly, frantically, hair already tangling beneath her against the fur-covered mattress.  “I need more,” she whispers, “I need all of you.”

“Abby – “

“Please,” she moans, “please,” and so he takes a deep breath and gives her all of him, pushing in the rest of the way until he’s buried in her up to the hilt.  Her eyes grow dizzy, unfocused, and it takes all the strength she has left to stifle a cry so loud it’s nearly a scream as her hands clutch desperately at his back.  “Oh God,” she manages to choke out in a hoarse, ragged voice.  “Marcus.”  He lifts his hips, pulls an inch or two out, then plunges back in, and suddenly they’re both lost.

Abby’s fingers dig into his back so deeply that they leave red marks on his flesh, her hips slamming up from the mattress to meet his.  They thank God that the bed is a low mattress heaped with furs; a wooden headboard would have splintered against the wall by now. 

Abby comes the first time against the insistent stroking of his fingertips, her entire body clenching and convulsing against him as she buries her face in his shoulder to stifle a cry.  “Oh God, Marcus, oh God,” she gasps over and over, and it’s the little quaver in her voice that finally topples him over the edge, as he bursts inside her, groaning her name.  He comes and comes, hips bucking against her, and the receding waves of her own orgasm reignite inside her with each thrust.  She comes again from the hot, desperate friction and the unspeakably erotic sound of his rough animal cries, the stammering gasps of shocked pleasure as sensations he’s never felt before sweep through every nerve in his body.  Their hip buck and stutter and quake into each other until at long last, the earthquake fades away and they collapse against the furs in a sweaty, tangled heap.

He shifts his weight to roll off her but she shakes her head frantically, clutching at his back.  “No, stay here, stay here,” she whimpers shakily, “don’t move yet.  Don’t let go.”  He’s too weak and spent to protest, sinking heavily against her small silken body as she cradles him close, stroking his hair, feeling him slowly soften inside her. He feels like he’s melting, like his body has become a warm liquid thing, a river of honey, that flows drowsily to intermingle with hers.

Finally, after his cock has softened back into slumber, gently sliding out of her with a soft damp _pop,_ he lifts his head enough to look down at her and press a kiss against her mouth.

“Hi,” he says, a little stupidly, and it flips a switch inside Abby, who suddenly bursts into quiet, helpless giggles.  She buries her face in his neck, shoulders quaking with silent laughter.

“Hi,” she murmurs back teasingly.  “Nice to meet you.”

And then he starts laughing too.

They clutch each other like the survivors of a shipwreck, tears streaming down their cheeks, trembling with barely-muffled hilarity as the full force of their ridiculous, absurd situation crashes down on top of them at once.  They’ve known each other for decades, have been developing feelings for each other for months, and yet suddenly tonight they came within inches of jeopardizing the first-ever Grounder/Azgeda/Skaikru truce by entirely losing control. “Christ, we’re as bad as a couple of teenagers,” he mutters, which makes her giggle even harder.

“I never did it like _that_ when I was a teenager,” she retorts.  “That was more like wild animals in heat.”

“Maybe there were aphrodisiacs in one of those seventeen hundred Grounder delicacies we stuffed ourselves with,” he offers, which makes her snicker.

“Maybe it’s pheromones.  Chancellor mating season.”

He rolls his eyes mockingly at this, for which he earns a smack on the ass - making them both laugh again - but really, they both know exactly what it is.

_Release._

The desperate ache of desire had risen between them to a fever pitch and until now there had been no end in sight.  It was like bursting a bubble, that first moment when he slipped inside her as though their bodies had been designed to fit each other perfectly.  Pure, blissful relief.  The satisfaction of a burning, urgent need.  They were parched and desperate, but now they’ve drunk deeply and their bodies are satisfied.  The sudden evaporation of that level of tension all at once has left them giddy and silly and _alive_ and very, very happy. 

There are still a hundred things he wants to do - places he wants to touch her, kiss her.  Things to whisper in her ear.  Sounds he wants to hear her make.  But they have time, they have all night and the rest of their lives, and since he can’t possibly run out of ideas in six months they’re just going to have to make this resettlement plan work.

He wants to tell Abby that nothing has ever felt like this before, never in all his life.  But she smiles up at him and runs her fingers through his hair, face open and joyful and glowing with love, and he thinks to himself that she already knows.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PROMPT: "a morning kiss" (NSFW)

They’ve missed sleeping in the same bed.

The radio helped with taking the edge off the tension rising between them, but it did nothing for the craving to be touched and held that made Abby’s bed and Marcus’ tent feel too big and cold and empty for the past two weeks.  It’s heaven to feel the warmth of another body, the rush of warm breath against skin. Marcus has missed the feeling of Abby’s hair brushing silkily against his chest, while Abby has missed the soft soothing sound of his snoring.   But it’s so different this time, because the last vestige of any distance or shyness between them has evaporated.  They drift off gently, limbs tangled together – Marcus on his back, Abby’s thigh draped over his and her head pillowed on his chest, cradled close by strong arms – bodies warm and damp with sweat and wrapped in the hazy scent of sex.  

Marcus wakes again four or five hours later, roused by the feeling of Abby shifting and stirring in his arms.  He feels a soft, gentle hand run soothingly through his hair, sending warmth throughout his whole body. 

“Marcus,” she whispers in his ear.  “Are you awake?”

He opens his eyes to see her chin propped up on her hands, watching him.  “Hi,” she says, smiling sleepily.

“Everything okay?” he asks, brow furrowed in worry.  “Can you not sleep?  Was it another – “

She shakes her head.  “Everything’s fine,” she murmurs, her lips brushing lightly over his chest.  “Everything’s wonderful.”

“Then what,” he begins to ask, but the reason she woke him up in the middle of the night becomes abundantly clear once she shifts her weight again.  She’s warm and wet and she’s slipped her hand down beneath the covers to run light fingertips up and down the shaft of his still-slumbering cock as she presses light kisses against his chest.  He swallows, hard.  “Oh.”

“I want you some more,” she whispers, her breath against his neck and collarbone making him shiver.  “Please?”

He can’t imagine saying no to her, but she’s so sexy like this – sleep-disheveled and pleading – that he pretends to demur for a moment.  “It’s the middle of the night, Abby.  We should sleep.”

“We can sleep after.”

“Abby – “

“Please, Marcus,” she breathes, nibbling her way up his neck with tiny frantic kisses, and there’s only so long he can keep up the pretense when she’s pressed up hard against the indisputable evidence that he wants her too.  “Please.”

She’s straddling him now, hands braced against his shoulders, mouth buried in his throat, and he’s done amusing himself by delaying her because now his whole body is pulsing with desire and he can’t wait any longer either.  In one swift motion – startling a little gasp out of Abby – he sits up and pulls her with him, onto his lap, letting her legs wrap around his back as their bodies fuse together.  His cock is hard and heavy and aching, pressed between their bodies, and she reaches down a gentle hand to slide up and down the shaft, running her finger over that place that makes him gasp and flinch.  She laughs a little, and does it again.

“Goddamn you,” he growls as she laughs mischievously at him, peppering little kisses along his jaw.

“Oh, do you like it right there?”

“You know I do.”

“And here, too, right?” she asks innocently as her thumb presses a firm circle around the head of his cock – now flushed and swollen – just beneath the flared ridge.  His whole body contracts and a low hissing breath escapes him.  She smiles.  “More?”  

He shakes his head.  “I want something different right now,” he whispers roughly, “I want it the way we didn’t do it before.”

“What do you want, Marcus?” she whispers back, cupping his jaw in her hands and caressing his skin with her fingers.

“I want you slow,” he answers her, and it sends a little shiver down her spine.  She bites her lip, nodding in mute desperation, then closes her eyes and sighs in blissful pleasure while she slowly, inch by inch, guides his cock inside her.  

They were too overwhelmed the first time to savor the banquet of sensations, but they feel everything now.  Inside, Abby is warm – almost hot – and as silken and slippery as ripe fruit.  But when he enters her, he feels her contract around him, holding him close in the most intimate kind of embrace.  He brushes tangled strands of hair away from her face and looks down into her warm, dazed brown eyes as she rises and falls, rocking against his thighs, shivering from the bliss of friction. 

She closes her eyes for a moment, savoring the feeling of Marcus moving deep and deep and deep inside her, stretching her open with a delicious, relentless pressure, hot iron wrapped in velvet.  He ducks his head to take first one breast, then the other, into his mouth as Abby arches her back and sighs.  “I like that,” she murmurs, as he flicks his tongue experimentally against her nipple, smiling as he feels the skin pebble beneath his lips, just like Abby told him it would.  

She feels him begin to rise toward orgasm and slows down, deliberate and precise, letting him cool down just enough before she begins to ride him again, gently, with long slow rolling motions of her hips.  It goes on like that until they’re both weak and dizzy and have lost track of time, foreheads bent together, cradling each other’s faces in their hands.  They edge each other without even realizing it, locked into each other’s gaze, wanting to draw out the moment as long as they can, wanting it to last forever. But finally, the tidal wave rises up inside them both and they simply can’t hold back its force, so they surrender.

“Oh, Abby,” Marcus pants over and over again, his lips brushing hungrily against hers as she shifts her weight to take him all the way inside her, pressing down with the full force of her strength to let his cock open her up completely.  Dizzy with pleasure, she melts into him, hands sliding roughly up his neck to clutch at his hair as she sinks forward, boneless, liquid, trembling, burying her face in the hollow of his shoulder.  She’s too shattered to move, so he takes over, cradling her limp body against his chest as he rises and falls inside her, guiding them both faster and faster towards their climax.  Her cries have softened to a broken, inarticulate panting, of which all he can make out is the word “yes” over and over as she whimpers into the warm, sweat-sheened skin of his neck.  Her voice, her pleasure, her yearning for him, her hot breath against his skin, makes him burn hot and cold all over.

He had no idea it could feel like this.

When she finally comes, a wild shudder ripples through her whole body.  Her back arches almost violently and she convulses once, twice, three times before sinking back against his shoulder and going limp and still in his arms.  “Come inside me,” she whispers breathlessly, resting her head sleepily against his shoulder, pressing hot little kisses against his neck, but he doesn’t need to be told, he was already about to topple over the edge.  He comes hard too – harder than he ever has before – nearly faint with the release of pressure from having edged inside her for so long.  His arms tighten around her back as his hips rock up and up and then he bursts deep inside her with a long, low moan.  Abby hums a contented little sigh at the feeling, burrowing closer into his chest, her fingers tangling in the damp sweaty curls at the nape of his neck.

For a long, long time, they just hold each other like that, too spent to move, catching their breath and slowly returning to earth. Abby can feel the heavy, rapid pounding of Marcus’ heart pressed against her own, and it makes her ache in some way she can’t quite define.  She wonders if she’s the first person in his life – besides maybe Vera – who has ever gotten close enough to Marcus Kane to know what his heartbeat feels like.  

“Is it always like this?” he murmurs into her hair, something like wonder in his voice, and it makes her want to laugh and cry at once. She pulls back just a little, so she can see him, resting her forehead against his.

“No,” she tells him honestly, stroking his cheek with the back of her hand.  “No, love, I don’t think it is.”  

He closes his eyes, and she realizes with a pang in her chest that he’s crying.  She doesn’t say anything, but presses her lips softly against his cheekbones – first one, then the other – to catch the tears as they fall.  “I thought I was broken,” he murmurs, so softly she almost can’t hear him.  “I didn’t think I’d ever have this.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, kissing his face over and over, heart aching with desperate, ferocious love.  “I’m sorry you spent forty-two years believing that.  I’m sorry that it took this long.”

“You were worth the wait,” he says in a low voice, crackling with intensity.  “And I don’t just mean tonight.  I mean all my life.”

She doesn’t know what to say to this.

“I just thought this was something that … that not everyone gets to have,” he explains, fumbling for the right words. She doesn’t say anything, just running her fingers up and down his cheek, letting him take his time.   “I thought in a world as confined as ours,” he goes on, “with so few chances at real happiness, it seemed to make the idea of love feel … illusory.  I don’t know.  Impractical. Or at any rate, so unlikely that it seemed foolish to hope for it.  To wait for it.  I used to look at you and Jake, at what you had, and it all just seemed … impossible. I thought Thelonious maybe had it right, his way made sense.  Marry someone who can be a sensible, useful partner, produce and raise a child to carry on the next generation, and find whatever contentment you can along the way. That made sense to me.  I understood it.”

She nods in silence, and he doesn’t say anything for a long time either.  

(Though neither of them says her name, they are both thinking about Callie.  They don’t speak of her.  They never have.  They don’t think about that day at the airlock, both of them side by side this time, united in one cause for the first time in years to plead desperately for Jaha to show her the same capricious mercy he showed to Abby. They don’t think about the frightened tears on Callie’s face or her trembling shoulders as Jaha lifted his hand to press the button.  They don’t think about how, for the first time in all their lives, Abby reached out in her grief and pain to take Marcus’ hand, or how he held it tightly in his own, feeling it anchor him to the ground, as though it was only Abby’s strength that kept him from being pulled out into the darkness too.  They don’t think about how long they stood there after the outer door hissed shut again, heedless of Jaha and the guards walking past them to depart the airlock, as Marcus and Abby stood hand-in-hand looking out at the stars with silent tears streaking down their faces.

It didn’t bring them closer after that, the shared witnessing of that terrible day.   It only widened the rift until they could hardly bear to look at each other.)

“You were right there,” he says suddenly, pulling back to look at her, cradling her face in his hands.  “All my life. And I never saw you.  Not like this.  Why did I never _see_ you?”

“It wasn’t our time, then,” she says simply.  “The only thing that matters is that we’re here now.”

* * *

It’s Marcus who wakes first in the morning, roused from sleep by the bright wintry sun streaming in the high narrow slit in the stone wall above their bed.  It’s an hour or so after dawn.  Abby, smiling in her sleep, is burrowed cozily beneath the heavy pile of furs, a cloud of tangled honey-colored hair tumbling loose over her shoulders.  He leans in to brush a loose strand out of her eyes, unable to resist pressing a soft kiss against her parted, rosy lips, before curling up close beside her and watching her sleep.

He wishes he could remember how it all began.  It seems like there should be a moment, one pure single moment crystallized in time – like the dragonfly trapped in amber the teacher showed them in Earth Skills, he suddenly remembers, something he hasn’t thought of in years – that he could look back later and point to and say, “Here.  Here’s where it happened.  Here’s where I fell in love with her.”  It always sounded to him, from books, as though it were something like being struck by lightning.  Something unmissable, life-changing, singular.  Something that you’d know was happening as it happened to you.

But it turns out, he thinks to himself as he watches Abby’s chest rise and fall beneath the thick animal-scented pelts of fur draped over their bodies, that it isn’t like that at all.  It’s not like being struck by lightning.  It’s like winter changing into spring.  It comes on so gradually – a few blossoms at a time, bursting their hardy way through the crust of snow – that you don’t always know where you’re going until you’ve arrived.

Outside this room, he knows, the world is moving forward with unrelenting speed.  Outside this room, Roan’s servants are bustling up and down the hallways (he can hear the soft clatter of someone leaving a breakfast tray outside their door) and preparing for the formal summit at noon.  Outside this room, there’s a vast, chilly field studded with tents and the cold remains of campfires where a coalition of Sky People and Grounders are beginning to build a new society together, in the hopes of surviving the apocalypse that will come for them all in six months.  Outside this room, he is Chancellor Kane, _heda kom Skaikru,_ who bears the mark of the Commander on his forearm and speaks on his people’s behalf.

But inside this room, he’s just Marcus, a man with four hours before he has to leave this bed and the woman curled up next to him inside it, which means that being the Chancellor can wait.

He kisses Abby’s mouth again, and this time it wakes her.  He feels her smile sleepily against his lips and open her mouth to kiss him back in earnest.  “Morning,” she says drowsily as he pulls away.  “Your turn to wake up frisky this time, huh?”

He smiles and kisses her again, stroking her hair back out of her face.  “Just lie still,” he tells her.  “Are you comfortable?”  She nods, eyes drifting closed again, utterly content, as he brushes his lips down her throat and over her breasts to kiss his way down her body.

It’s cold in their room, and Abby’s happily ensconced in her mountain of fur coverlets, warm and snug, and he doesn’t want her to freeze by pulling them back.  So he makes his way down in the dark, his mouth and tongue guiding him, until he arrives at the soft silken hair between her thighs.  Abby’s hands beneath the covers reach out for him, tangling in his curls and urging him on.  He’s never done this before, but he spent two weeks listening to Abby describe over the radio exactly what she likes.  “ _Labia majora,”_ he hears her crisp, professional (and indescribably erotic) voice in his head as his fingers glide over the soft, damp outer folds. “ _You can suck on them, or take them very lightly between your teeth, or massage them between your fingers.”_

He begins with his hands, touching her gently, exploring her.  Her thighs begin to tremble as he slowly caresses the folds of silky damp flesh between his thumb and forefinger with a light, insistent pressure, gently opening her up to him, stirring her to warm wetness and soft sighs.

His fingers drift almost absentmindedly to the soft flutter of delicate flesh just inside. _“Labia minora,”_ says Abby’s voice.   _“Run your tongue very lightly along the fold.”_

So he bends his head, eyes closed, breathing deeply to inhale her earthy, rich scent, and then parts his lips to slowly, slowly, press a soft kiss against the silky inner folds of Abby’s cunt.

The moment he makes contact, Abby flinches so hard her hip careens upward to slam into his jaw, a sharp startled cry escaping her lungs.  Horrified, he scrabbles his way out of the blankets and back into the light, afraid he’s hurt her, but is startled when she seizes his face in desperate hands and kisses him again and again.

“What,” he begins, baffled and disoriented.  “What – “

“You have a beard,” she murmurs, her mouth hot and hungry on his.

“Oh no.”  He pulls back, cradling her face in his hands. “Was it not  . . . was it not okay?” he asks hesitantly. “Did I hurt you?”

“Oh God, she murmurs, eyes wide, shaking her head desperately.  “No, Marcus, no, you didn’t hurt me.  It felt … I’ve never felt anything like it before.  Keep going,” she begs him, “please, honey, keep going.”

Her eyes are wide and dark and she’s biting her lip and making the same face she made when she woke him up in the middle of the night, and he feels a warm wave of pure happiness course through his bloodstream.

“You’ve never had anyone do … that to you with a beard?” he asks.  “Jake never had one?”  She shakes her head, and Marcus beams with delight.  “So then I get to give _you_ something brand-new, too,” he says, and if he had ever had any doubts about the depth of her feelings for him, the pure love shining in her eyes at that would remove all doubt.

Encouraged, he makes his way back down beneath the fur blankets and feels Abby settle in against the pillows, opening herself hungrily back up to him again.  This time he’s ready for it, when he ducks his head to run the tip of his tongue up the warm wet center of her and feels her whole body flinch at the shiver-inducing rush of contact as his beard brushes her desperately sensitive clit.  His hands slide up her thighs, flat against taut muscle, to hold her in place and keep her from arching off the bed completely to capture more of his tongue.

He tastes her everywhere, savoring everything.  She’s trembling, gasping, whimpering, hands clutching frantically at his hair as he nuzzles deeper and deeper into her, wrapping his lips around her clit.  He follows her instructions precisely.  He knows where she likes hard flat licks and quick sharp flicks of his tongue, where he can suck and bite very gently and where she wants only the lightest of kisses.   And he learns, very quickly, that each brings with it a very specific sound – sharp hissing inhalations of breath, delicate high-pitched cries, low moans of yearning.  It’s like music, he thinks as he slowly coaxes her to orgasm, the way the soft staccato murmurs of _“oh, oh, oh”_ rise up and up in pitch, accelerating faster and faster.  He can’t keep himself from moaning his own sounds of pleasure at the rich, savory taste of her, and his low rumbling hum is the bass note anchoring the melody of her delicate lilting cries.

He can feel the pressure rising inside her, feeling her hips buck and her muscles contract and her fingers clutch more frantically at his hair.  She’s trying so hard not to scream, he can feel her fighting it, but as the dam breaks and she comes against his mouth she begins to lose control.  The soft flutter of “oh, oh, oh” grows louder and louder until she pulls the thick heavy fur blankets over her own head as well to muffle the sound.

He feels her shudder and subside into stillness, but he’s reluctant to tear himself away.  He slows his pace, light, gentle, and presses soft kisses against her outer folds, careful not to brush his beard against her now almost painfully-sensitive clit.  But he discovers, with delight, that running his tongue lightly between the inner and outer folds stirs her to aching pleasure without touching her clit, and she comes a second time – softer this time, and gentler – before she pulls him up to kiss his warm wet mouth, over and over.  When she finally lets him go, he sees a faintly wicked gleam in her eye that sends a shiver of anticipation down his spine.

“You’re a very good student,” she tells him, in that crisp, slightly prim examining-room voice he found so startlingly erotic when it whispered to him through the radio.

“Oh really?” he chuckles, nuzzling against her neck until she giggles from the ticklish sensation.  “Did I get an A on my exams, Doctor Griffin?”

“You’ve passed Female Anatomy with flying colors,” she agrees, “but your Male Anatomy coursework is still incomplete.”

“Oh, is it.”

“It is, yes.”

“All right, then,” he concedes agreeably.  “Sign me up for your advanced lessons.”

She grins and pushes him gently back against the cushions, kissing her way down his chest to his nipples.  “Do you know why you have these?” she goes on in a professorial voice, running a light fingertip around the dark brown areola, instantly raising goosebumps all over his body.

“For this exact moment, so you can do that to them?”

She laughs.  “Human embryos begin to develop mammary tissue in utero very early,” she says primly, leaning down to flick the tip of her tongue very gently against his left nipple, causing him to hiss a sharp inhalation of breath and clench his fists.  “Before the chromosome processes take place.  So they begin to emerge before the embryo has a gender.”  Her hand slides down his torso to brush delicate fingertips over the pulsing, aching head of his cock as her tongue rings first, then the other areola.  Marcus can’t breathe, goosebumps sweeping all over his body.  “There’s no evolutionary advantage, of course – “

“Purely decorative.”

“Exactly. Just for fun.  And because there’s no genetic downside, they were never selected against during the evolutionary process.”

“Fascinating,” he gasps as her fingertip grazes the agonizingly sensitive slit in the head of his cock, dipping the very tip of her fingernail inside and causing his hips to jerk abruptly towards her.

“I happen to find human genetics very interesting,” she reproves him, sliding her hand down the now-throbbing shaft, over the heavy, aching mounds at his base.

“Oh, I’m interested,” he manages to choke out in a broken exhale as she does something completely unexpected, reaching back with a light touch to scratch her fingernails over a patch of skin behind his cock that he has never given a moment’s thought to in his entire life until this moment.  The second she touches it, an electric shock rockets through his entire body.

“Advanced Male Anatomy,” she informs him.  “This is your perineum.”

“Oh God, Abby – “

“It’s the third most sensitive spot on your body, I’ll have you know.”

“Abby …”

“And it responds particularly well while stimulated concurrently with other erogenous zones,” she says, and before he can ask her what she means he realizes with a start that she’s disappeared completely beneath the fur coverlet and he can feel her breath on his thighs.

Marcus closes his eyes, lightheaded, disoriented, all concrete sense of the world around him beginning to blur and fade.  Abby’s delicate fingertips continue to rake delicately across his skin, and a convulsive shiver rocks through his whole body as he feels her lips softly, gently close around the head of his cock.

He’s not a person anymore, not even a body.  He’s just a lightning storm of colliding sensations.  Warm breath, soft wet lips, fingertips scratching lightly over skin, the insistent pressure of a hungry little tongue.  She hums a quiet, happy sigh as her lips part to take him deeper, then deeper, and the vibration pulses through him like a tiny earthquake.  “Abby,” he chokes out desperately as her lips glide up and down, up and down, her hands joining them with gentle insistent pressure, kneading and twisting gently against the shaft.

Then she lifts his cock, pressing it tight against his belly to reveal the sensitive underside.  Her tongue glides hard and flat up the throbbing ridge of his vein, and then suddenly, startlingly, she finds it, that tiny spot that unraveled him completely that first night with the radio when she guided his hand there.  She licks lightly at that small indentation and Marcus feels like he’s drowning, warmth and pressure rising up around him like a sea closing over his head, relentless, inescapable, the climax soaring through his body seemingly from everywhere at once.

She feels it begin to build and her hands pump deftly up and down, lips closed firmly around the head to signal him that it’s all right, that she wants him to release himself inside her.  He clenches the sheets in white-knuckled fists, hips thrusting up involuntarily to surge deeper into her mouth, and he can feel her smiling.  She gives another soft little humming sigh of happiness, and it’s the sigh that does it, the trembling vibration setting off fireworks all throughout his body, and then he tumbles off the cliff.

“Abby,” he groans, low and rough and frantic, as he bursts inside her and fills her mouth.  He comes and comes, feeling Abby’s cheeks hollow as she drinks deeply, coaxing out every last drop with the pressure of her hands.  She swallows again and again, warmth cascading down her throat, and strokes with both her hands until he’s spent, shaking, drained, until she feels him go soft and gentle inside her hungry lips.  She releases him with a soft, shivery little wet sound, delicately licking him clean – careful not to touch any of the now painfully-sensitive places she was so hungrily devouring before.  When he’s entirely spent, she crawls back up out of the warm darkness to emerge from beneath the furs, disheveled and smiling.

“So that’s Advanced Male Anatomy, huh?’ he teases her as he begins to catch his breath, and she laughs, settling her small warm body into the crook of his arm and pressing a light kiss on his mouth.

“One of my best subjects,” she quips.

“So it would seem.”

She rests her head on his chest, and they lay still for a few moments as she listens to Marcus catching his breath.

It doesn’t occur to either of them how _improbable_ they are.  How another woman might feel impatient at Marcus’ shyness, inexperience, that sense of hesitation that catches up with him when he lets himself pause too long to think.  But Abby loves him for it, loves that endearing sense of innocence and discovery.  It breaks her heart and swells it to bursting, all at once.

And it’s true for Marcus too.  A different man might feel threatened by the ghost of Jake Griffin in their bed, jealous of all the things Abby learned with a man who wasn’t him.  But he loves her for it, that confident assuredness, the way she always knows exactly what to do.  He doesn’t trust very many people enough to let himself go in their presence, but he feels safe when Abby is in control.

It wasn’t their time, then, Abby had said to him last night, and she was right. 

But it’s their time now.

* * *

_It wasn’t given to Marcus and Abby to know how their story would end while they were still living it – just as it is not given to any of us to know, when we are born into the world, what will become of our lives._

_Thelonious called them a “transitional generation.”  Keep humanity alive on the Ark, that’s all they had to do.  They were like Moses, guiding their people to a Promised Land they themselves were never meant to see._

_They could never have predicted Earth.  They could never have predicted this love.  They never saw any of this coming._

_There are so many things they don’t know about the future unfolding before them, as they lie in their fur-draped bed in the King of the Ice Nation’s castle, listening to each other’s gentle breathing as the sun streams in through a high stone window.  They don’t know about the geodesic domes Raven will invent, the rows of hydroponic greenhouses Jasper and Monty will design to create self-sustaining food sources, or the communication link Clarke will establish through the Commander’s Flame with Becca that allows her to shut down the three nuclear plants nearest to Ice Nation, leaving their mountain runoff water supply uncontaminated._

_They don’t know, yet, that they will_ live.

_It’s not six months, it’s a lifetime, a long and good one, with a camp full of children and green things growing under a still-blue sky.  They will finish the work Jake Griffin started, to find the Sky People a permanent, lasting home.  And hundreds of years from now, children will walk through the wreckage of those now-empty glass domes and tell each other the stories of how the people from the earth and the people from the sky united to survive the Great Storm and rebuild the world.  They will run through the fields, now bursting with fruit and flowers and trees in bloom, and they will know the names of the men and women who came together here centuries ago to build them this home._

_Every year, on the feast of New Unity Day, the children will perform a pageant depicting the day the Grounders, Sky People and Ice Nation finally moved into their new home,_ Kongedacapa _(“Coalition City”) to weather the Great Storm together.  They will gather around the Eden Tree – its vast, ageless canopy of green casting a sweet cool shade over the center of the city - with sticks as toy swords and crowns made of daisies, to honor the great heroes who once saved the human race. Roan the Ice King, whose land became their home.  Lexa and Luna, greatest of all the Commanders.  Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake, who led the army of children from the sky through dangers untold.  Lincoln the Gentle and Octavia the Bold, first of the Grounders and Sky People to believe that together their people could know peace._

_But the greatest honor is reserved for a boy with a round knot symbol drawn on his forearm in the ink of wild berries, and a girl with two small rings on a chain – centuries old, preserved with care – around her neck, who kneel side by side for the ceremonial watering of the Eden Tree.  Marcus the Peaceful and Abigail the Life-Giver, the Last Chancellors, who fell from the stars to find love at the moment they thought the world was ending._

_The boy and the girl will kneel on the spot where Marcus and Abigail were wed so many hundreds of years ago, when the tree was first planted in the soil after the Great Storm ended, and perform the ritual.  Water from the river that runs through what was once Ice Nation is poured from a stone bowl that once belonged to Commander Lexa onto the roots of the tree that Chancellor Marcus Kane tended on the Ark as a child._

_It will be a fable to them, a legend of long-ago heroes and warriors.  They will make their parents tell them the tales of Clever Raven, who never met a riddle she couldn’t solve, or the sinister Mountain Men who once kidnapped children to lock them underground, or the love of the Last Chancellors who changed the course of history.  
_

_They’re stories, really.  Not people._

_But the thing that matters is that they_ lived.

_They lived, and their people lived, and the children will remember._

**THE END  
**


End file.
